All White Schools
Edna Morris Harvey, who lived in Pahokee from 1917 to 1920, recalled: “We went to a little one-room schoolhouse like in the olden days, walking a mile down the ridge to get to it. Miss Margaret Jones was our teacher. We didn’t pay much attention to her, but she did the best she could.”
On the second floor of Jupiter’s first school “in town,” near today’s Town Hall Avenue, residents voted for incorporation in 1925. After serving briefly as Town Hall, in 1927 the building was determined to be unsafe; a new schoolhouse was built on Loxahatchee Drive, which was recently restored and is still in use as Jupiter Elementary School. Also known as “Old Jupiter School,” the Mediterranean Revival building served about 100 white students’ grades 1-12 when it opened and was Jupiter’s main school for 37 years.
Kelsey City Elementary School, now Lake Park Elementary, opened in 1923 in the county’s first planned city. When the town and school’s names were changed in 1939, former county judge Emery Newell was in 8th grade at the school on 3rd Street, and recalled in a 2004 oral history interview:
The old basic building, kind of U-shaped, … had about six classrooms as I recall, eight grades. The first six grades of school had two classes in a room, so the first and second grade were together, the 3rd and 4th were together, the 5th and 6th were together, with one teacher. So it somewhat resembled the old-fashioned one-story schoolhouse. Not many kids went to school there, probably about a dozen—15 in my class, which was the largest that had ever gone through school there.
[It] bothered me a bit, that I was one of the two or three kids in my class, I guess, that had shoes. I used to put my shoes in the bushes half way to school and go barefooted myself, and that worked okay, except on those days that it rained, and they got all wet, and my mother knew I’d been up to something.
The one-room schoolhouse in Boynton was replaced in 1913 by the Boynton School on Ocean Avenue. A high school was built in 1927 and lost its roof in the 1928 hurricane.
At the Yamato Colony of Japanese farmers between Delray and Boca Raton, the Yamato School taught white and Japanese students from at least 1918 until 1924. By then many of the Yamato colonists had left town, and the remaining children attended Boca Elementary.