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Lloyd students, teachers, alumni gather to bid farewell to school
By Susan Tebben
AUSTINTOWN
A group of current Lloyd Elementary students played recorders to welcome in alumni, teachers and administrators to the school, most of whom would be seeing the school for the last time.
The school, which will be closed and demolished at the end of the school year as the elementary schools are consolidated, hosted a farewell celebration for all who walked the hallways since it opened in 1955.
Principal Thomas Lenton has seen the halls from two different perspectives: As a student in the early ’60s under its first principal, and as the last principal the school will ever have.
“A lot has changed,” Lenton said. “This is where it all started for me, going to school and learning how to write and then being the last principal.”
Another person who had seen the school from its beginnings was Dorothy Lloyd Hood, whose father, Armour Lloyd, had donated the money for the school.
“It’s kind of sad that they’re tearing it down,” she said.
Hood said her father, owner of Lloyd Packing, donated the money “because he wanted to see his name on it,” but that he would have enjoyed seeing all the people that had come through its doors.
“I can’t believe all the people I’ve met that I recognize,” Hood said.
Hood went to high school at Austintown Fitch with Walt Shively, who would become Lloyd’s first principal, and Lenton’s principal as well.
Shively’s son, Guy, airbrushed a portrait of the elder Shively, which hung in the school for three decades. He also spent his first six years of schooling in Lloyd.
“We would come up in the summers and help him organize,” Guy Shively said. “You could run in the hallways in the summers, and this was back when you still got paddled in school.”
It was there that he had a fourth-grade teacher who bought him a sheep that he showed as a member of 4-H. When he went to 4-H, he met a sign painter, who inspired him into his current career.
“If it hadn’t been for that teacher buying me that lamb, who knows,” Guy Shively said.
Guy’s daughter, Linsy, also attended the school from first to fourth grade, said she remembered the cafeteria and the fun she had while a student there.
“The place seems a lot bigger when you’re a kid,” Linsy Shively said.