The old made new again

IT WAS a landmark in once little Rogers, Ark.: the old Lane Hotel at Second and Poplar. And it’s about to become a proud landmark once again. For it combines the best of past and future. In this case, the best of architecture (an impressive five-story building, it’s already listed on the National Register of Historic Places) with the best of education (a charter school open to all). And what a sight it is to see as it is resurrected. Haas Hall Academy is one of the better known and most respected charter schools in the state, and this newest of its campuses should only add to its luster. Especially when some 250 students arrive soon. Yes, parents, school is about to begin again. Strength.

“I’m thoroughly impressed,” says John Burroughs, executive director of the Rogers Historical Museum, having just been given a guided tour of this new-old jewel in Rogers’ fast developing skyline. “I can’t think of anything else that would give that building such a long-term future in Rogers as Haas Hall taking up residence, adapting the building, re-using it and giving it new life.”

Welcome to your new-old home, kids, teachers and staffers. For the whole state has every reason to think y’all will live up to it. If your future is anything like your refurbished digs, all of Arkansas can expect to hear great things about you in the not too distant future. Indeed, in Rogers it’s already here.

The building, which went up in 1928, is now a beehive of activity as the finishing touches are added to its return to life. It’s got bright new classrooms along with a second-floor lobby designed to appear just as it did when the imposing structure was first constructed.

How sum up the place? Martin Schoppmeyer, who founded Haas Hall Academy and is now its superintendent, said it’s the nicest school he’s ever been in. And he ought to know, having been with the academy back when it was housed in a dairy barn. “I’ve never seen anything like this in my life,” he adds. “It feels good. It’s open, you have windows, you get everything. I remember in the dairy-barn days, we didn’t have more than two windows.” There are no secrets here, and no need for there to be any, not when you’ve got a showplace of a school.

The school’s headmaster is longtime and much-respected journalist Larry Henry, who’s seen the light and become an educator. But it sounds as though he’s still got printer’s ink in his veins, for after a tour of the plant, he said he was excited about the prospect of being an educator at a building that includes a newsroom, a television production studio, and an up-to-date kitchen that’s supposed to offer a healthful diet instead of the traditional one favored by now superannuated editors, which consisted mainly of bad coffee, sugar-caked cinnamon rolls and stale cigarette smoke. It’s a new age redolent of the best of the old instead of the worst.

By all means, let’s return to the past, for that would be true progress. And do it with style, as Haas Hall has done.