communitylife
Family Connections Run Deep at Stuart-Hobson Middle School by Satu Haase-Webb and Janice MacKinnon
“S
tuart is the only school that I really felt connected with,” remembered Doris Hemsley, who graduated from Stuart Junior High School (SJHS) in 1964. Listening to conversations between three generations of the Hemsley-Jeffers family, one could overhear the tenor of how important it was for each mother to get their daughter into Stuart JHS, and later Stuart-Hobson Middle School (SHMS). Daughter Lynette Jeffers attended Hobson Middle School, above Watkins Elementary School, and was in the first graduating class of the new Capitol Hill Cluster
Doris Hemsley 68 H HillRag | April 2012
School in 1987. And thus, it was important to Lynette to get her daughter Tayia into Stuart-Hobson Middle School as well. “Teachers really care about their students,” added Freeman Wise, President of the Capitol Hill Kiwanis Club and SJHS graduate from the late 1950s, knowing of what he speaks after twenty years of being involved with this school’s Builders Club. Students of Stuart-Hobson Middle School’s Archives and Builders Club recorded several conversations like this one as part of an Archives project. The goal of the project was to
bring together multiple generations of families with experiences with the school in two “Family Connections” events on February 15 and March 7, 2012. Among the alumni families that attended one of these events was the Frazier-Jenkins family. Veola Frazier graduated from Stuart Junior High School in 1961. Almost thirty years later, she peered into the 8th grade science room of Sandra Jenkins, trying to decide whether the school was what she wanted for her only son, William. He attended, and at his graduation in 1992, he performed the song “It’s so hard to say Goodbye,” one of the fam-
ilies’ treasured memories. To complete the picture, a few years later, William went on to wed Ms. Jenkins’ only daughter, Callian. Aside from this experience and being the class of 1992 Salutarian, school sports played an important role in William Frazier’s life at StuartHobson Middle School. His basketball team took the city title in 1992, which he fondly remembered as the same year the Redskins won their last Superbowl. Throughout the years, Stuart Junior High, and later SHMS, always had strong sports teams in basketball, track, soccer, volleyball and baseball. With that came school pride, “we won everything… we won a lot of trophies…” in the 1960s, recalled Ms. Hemsley. Her conversation with current SHMS basketball and track stars, Anya Duffy and Ayana Dozier, shocked the girls as Ms. Hemsley described how they had to play “half court,” meaning the guards could not even cross that center line! As the neighborhood changed, the school changed with it: from an all-white school until the early 1950s, Stuart Junior High shortly became an all-black school and was integrated in 1954 after the US Supreme Court’s decision in Bolling v. Sharpe. By the 1970s, as the neighborhood demographics changed, the school was predominantly African-American. With gentrification, many white neighborhood teenagers attended the school, adding to increasing numbers of outof-boundary students through the years. All these changes only helped to galvanize the character of the school as a diverse and close-knit community. What students were taught changed with changing social roles and expectations. In the 1960s, in home economics classes, female students were tested in “how to make beds” and how to properly sew a blouse by hand. Moreover, there was