YOUNGSTOWN Upcoming demolition of school prompts nostalgia from alumni

Harding and Taft elementary schools will be demolished this summer and replaced.
By RON COLE
VINDICATOR EDUCATION WRITER
YOUNGSTOWN -- Ed Sepesy walked into the classroom and leaped back in time.
All of a sudden, it was 1958.
Dwight D. Eisenhower was in the White House, and little Ed Sepesy was in kindergarten at Harding Elementary School on the city's North Side.
"I remember looking out these windows and seeing all of the way to the East Side," Sepesy, now 48, said Friday from his kindergarten classroom of long ago.
"Oh, there used to be a big piano over there," he said, pointing to a corner of the room. "Everything's just a lot smaller. I remember this being a very big room."
Sepesy was among a handful of former Harding pupils who visited -- and bid farewell to -- their old school Friday.
To be torn down
The school, built in 1921, will be demolished this summer to make way for a new school on the same site.
Harding's 350 pupils will be relocated to the former Jefferson Elementary School in Brier Hill until the new building, which also will be named Harding, is ready to open in two years.
Principal Beverly Schumann invited alumni to stop by the building Friday during the school's annual field day events.
"It's too bad these buildings have to come down, but I guess that's progress," Sepesy said.
The closing of Harding and Taft Elementary School on the city's South Side, which also will be demolished this summer and replaced, is the first step in the city school district's six-year, $182.5 million facilities project.
In all, the plan calls for four new elementary schools, a new high school and a new middle school, as well as major renovations or additions to as many as a dozen other school buildings.
Teacher Mary Grace Fowler already has 82 boxes full of books, supplies and other stuff stacked in her first-grade classroom, ready for the transfer to Jefferson.
"Then, in two years, I have to pack it up again and bring it back," she said.
Lawrence Caras, 72, of Liberty, came to Harding in 1936 as a 6-year-old first-grader.
"They don't build them like this anymore," Caras said as he walked the school's hallways Friday.
Shrunken cafeteria
He peeked into the cafeteria. "When I was here, I thought this was the size of some big palace in New York City," he laughed. "Now, it's so small."
Mary Muldoon of Hubbard said she's sure to shed a tear when the building comes down. Muldoon attended kindergarten at Harding in 1963, did her student-teaching at the school in 1980 while she was a student at Youngstown State University, and has taught at the school for the past 10 years.
"I'm going to be a little emotional when it's over," she said. "It's been a big part of my life."
cole@vindy.com