Retired teachers recall 21st Street Elementary School Fire from 40 years ago

HALEYVILLE     - Wednesday, April 30, 1986, is being remembered with sadness, as well as treasured memories, as now-retired educators are looking back 40 years to when the Haleyville School building on Highway 195 was destroyed by fire just a few weeks before the end of the school year.
The fire, which occurred after classes had already dismissed for the day, displaced 450 students in grades 4-6, as well as 23 teachers, causing damages exceeding $937,500, the estimated cost of the building at that time.
Wiley Waldrep, the custodian at the school at the time, who has since passed away, was working in the building after school when he heard a noise and found the ceiling of the large gymnasium on fire around one of the newly installed light fixtures, according to an account of the fire printed in the Alabamian at the time.
After Waldrep sounded the fire alarm, firefighters ended up arriving from at least 13 fire departments, as school employees assisted by volunteers did all they could to remove computers and other items from the building before the fire became too intense.
Linda Godsey, who was teaching special education in the school  in 1986, recalled that her room was near the main office area, which was on the right side of the building, looking at it from the highway.
Godsey recalled she felt panic because she had so many confidential student records in her classroom. 
“At that time, we didn’t do anything on the computers, so things were not backed up,” Godsey said.
Godsey’s classroom contained a special filing cabinet where all the records were kept, as well as the Holy Bible and an envelope containing money, she further recalled.
Although community volunteers were able to enter the school during the early stages of the fire and salvage items by handing them out the window to other volunteers and bringing items out, they were not able to get to Godsey’s classroom, she said.
“When the fire was complete and things settled down, everything wasn’t hot and the firemen allowed us back in it.  The first thing I did was go to that filing cabinet. It was still standing, and it looked pretty rough,” Godsey said.
“I opened it up, and there were all my records. They were singed around the edges, but all my records were intact,” she added.  
“There were other things in the filing cabinet that burned up.  I opened another drawer.  There were papers on top of (the Bible) that were burned. There were papers that were underneath it that were burned, but my Bible had not burned,” Godsey emphasized.
“It smelled like smoke,” she continued. “I kept those papers for years.  I can remember it like it happened yesterday.”
Rebecca Baggett, who was teaching 4th grade in the building, also on the right side near the office area, had already gone home when someone knocked on her door and told her the school was on fire, she recalled.
“That just broke my heart,” Baggett said. Baggett’s husband, Clint, who was also a teacher, was at the school and was able to retrieve some items from her classroom,  including her roll book before the fire reached the room, she further recalled.
Clint, assisted by other volunteers, was also able to retrieve the TV from her classroom, as well as computers from the nearby lab, Rebecca recalled.
Rebecca, who had been home with their daughter Frances-Ann, who was 1-year-old at the time,  took her to the school and saw the fire in progress.
“It was just so heartbreaking, watching it,” she said.
Clint and others were working against time to retrieve the items, as the fire had started inside the gymnasium located near Baggett’s classroom, she indicated. 
Although Clint and others were able to make it out safely, the fire spread quickly to destroy the building.
Baggett recalled she watched the progressing fire in disbelief. 
“We went to school there,” she said. “A lot of people went to high school there and they were teaching there.”
Saundra Rushing, who had also been teaching fourth grade in the building that burned, recalling returning to the school later that day after classes and seeing the school on fire with embers and smoke rising, she recalled.
“It was devastating,” Rushing said. “My mother had taught school before I was born.  She had a thing with the alphabet in it she gave me and I put it in my classroom.
“I didn’t get my grade book (out). I didn’t get anything,” Rushing recalled. 
Kathy Shyver, who was teaching in the building, recalled that before the fire, she could look out her classroom window and see what was once the Ray House across the highway, where many a school picture had been made, due to its scenic look and spring flowers that bloomed there.
That same yard of the Ray House was where school supplies and items that were retrieved from the building during the fire had been placed.
After Shyver got home from teaching that fateful day, she was contacted the school was on fire so she returned to school.
“There was no way of getting to my room,” Shyver said. However, several days after the fire, the filing cabinet was removed from her room and brought home, she said.
“Nothing was burned up in it,” recalled Shyver. 
Susan Williams was not teaching in the building that burned.  She was teaching first grade in what was known as the former home economics building (now Small Miracles Daycare) at the bottom of the hill.  However, she lived near the school.
“We lived right behind the post office. We saw all of it,” Williams recalled.
Williams was deeply affected by the fire, remembering that her school where she grew up in Georgia had burned when she was just a small child.
“It was a horrible thing to see a school building (burn),” said Williams.
As the fire raged into the nighttime hours, firefighters faced exhaustion, with at least three transported from the scene to what was then Burdick-West Hospital due to smoke inhalation, while another fireman suffered a cut from broken glass, earlier reports indicated.
Volunteers used the school cafeteria, located in the L-shaped building at the bottom of the hill from the burning school, as a place to prepare water for firefighters, reports said.
The school that burned was,, at the time, housing late elementary to middle school grade level students. The building had once been the high school, but the present high school was dedicated at its current location on 20th Street, in 1963, so high school aged students relocated there at that time.
The school building  that remains to this day at the lower level of the hill from the school that burned housed elementary grade levels, as well as the former home economics building and an L-shaped building, which also contained classrooms, the band room and the cafeteria below the school that burned.
The L-shaped building was torn down several years ago, and a monument made from school bricks was placed on the lot dedicated by the Haleyville Historical Society.