North Smithfield school closes doors after 62 years
Students, staff will move to addition at NS Elementary
ANORTH SMITHFIELD s she stood outside the school where she had worked as a teacher for its closing ceremonies on Monday, Town Councilwoman Claire O’Hara was thinking of one person in particular – the school’s namesake, Dr. Harry Lippitt Halliwell.
O’Hara, who had spent more than 36 years as a local teacher before retiring from the Halliwell Elementary School a few years ago, actually knew Dr. Halliwell while she was growing up in the town.
He was a young local doctor back
then who worked as the school department’s physician from 1950 to 1955, but O’Hara remembers Halliwell as her family’s pediatrician.
“For me, it’s a day of mixed emotions,” O’Hara said at the school’s closing ceremony, hosted by North Smithfield Elementary and Halliwell Principal Jennifer Daigneault.
“We were six kids in one family and he would stop by the house,” O’Hara remembered. Her father would leave a 10-dollar bill at the house to pay for Halliwell to take care of whichever of the children he had to tend to during his house call.
O’Hara can also remember the day when word arrived in her home that the young town doctor had died.
Halliwell was the school physician when a polio epidemic was raging and his duties included caring for those struck by the disease. Halliwell, the father of four young children, was stricken himself with the highly-contagious disease, and died in 1955.
When Halliwell Elementary was built in 1957, Dr. Halliwell’s service to the town was remembered with its dedication in his memory.
“I can remember the day they told me he had died and it was a sad day,” O’Hara said.
Members of Halliwell’s own family are among the outgoing class of Halliwell fourth- and fifth-graders and will be relocated to NSES and the middle school with their classmates in the fall.
Constructed on plans for a modular design, more typical in southern US states, with classrooms and core facilities in separate buildings connected by outdoor walkways, Halliwell Elementary was a school that came with physical challenges over the years including water damage, electrical problems, outdoor weather, and deterioration of its wood-frame buildings.
But just as Dr. Halliwell had served the town, so has his school, as several speakers pointed out Monday.
Generations of local children have attended the wooded campus downhill from Victory Highway.
As the school department moved forward with construction of a classroom addition at North Smithfield Elementary School using a $4.3 million school improvement bond, Halliwell was finally scheduled to close on the last day of the current school year, making this year’s students the final group to walk through its doors.
Daigneault pointed out that many in the community believed Monday would never come given the difficulties of moving its grades to new classroom spaces.
“It’s truly hard to believe that after 62 years of service it’s time to close many, many of Halliwell’s doors,” Daigneault said.
Just on Monday, she said the day at Halliwell began in a typical fashion as Assistant Principal Rachel Salvatore arrived at her office at 6:15 a.m. – and found half of the building to be without electricity.
“No phones and no internet. So in order to close Halliwell, we had to do it right so that’s how we started off this morning,” Daigneault said.
As to Halliwell’s standing as a local place of learning, Daigneault continued that “each and every person that is here, young and old has a memory about Halliwell. Over the past few months our community has strengthened as people shared their experience with this school.”
Some members of the school’s staff had attended Halliwell as students themselves, she noted. And for others like “Matt Todd, it’s the fact that his grandmother was in the first class to attend Halliwell and he will be the last class to attend Halliwell,” Daigneault said.
“Halliwell can be described easily using one simple word, beauty. It is unique in the way it is an open campus allowing students the freedom to move from one building to another. It is unique when the weather is warm like today and the classroom doors are open and our students are outside reading and writing.
“It is unique when the first storm of the winter hits and the grounds are peaceful and covered with snow,” Daigneault said.
“Whatever your connection is to Halliwell, it is strong and it runs deep, like the great Halliwell tree that is the center piece of our playground. It is certainly a place that will forever remain in the hearts and memories of all who were lucky enough to pass through its many, many doors,” the principal said.
Town Administrator Gary Ezovski offered that his first memory of Halliwell was of being “in the auditorium in my first concert playing trumpet with the young people’s orchestra of Woonsocket. It seems like a long time ago,” he said.
It was fitting, Ezovski said that Halliwell’s closing ceremony was being held even as the town is “struggling through a difficult town budget discussion which hopefully will end in wise financial decisions.
“From what I’ve read about the 1950s and the debate about how this school should be built. It also was a struggle. There was a more expensive plan that was voted down. This less expensive and unusual design of pods and walkways was the final choice,” Ezovski said.
But Ezovski said that the school was a great place for learning despite its difficulties thanks to its dedicated staff.
“It is you, every student and every member of the staff who have made this a great school. You who leave here today do so in the tradition of outstanding educators and students before you, who made this a great school,” the administrator said.
One of Halliwell’s students has been recognized with a Grammy Award and an Oscar nomination and another played on a Super Bowl football team, he noted.
“Outstanding administrators and teachers named Joyce, Peloquin, Shunney, Cayer, Kjersgard, Wecal, Healy, Syverson, Bretton, Brady, O’Hara, Maroney, McMullin, and Daigneault and so many more. All made great learning possible here. And of course even the name given the school is special. Could there be a better example to honor than Dr. Halliwell whose dedication to children in his profession cost him his life,” Ezovski said.
“As we leave here today may we never forget the selfless actions of those who have taught and learned here. May we never forget the dedication of Dr. Halliwell, and we may we never forget to focus every financial decision on long term value, value in education, value in buildings, value for North Smithfield,” Ezovski concluded.
School Superintendent Michael St. Jean said he did not grow up in the town and had not known about Halliwell until he was about to be hired in his position several years ago.
To help with his adjustment, St. Jean said he and his family took a tour of the town’s school properties and visited Halliwell nestled in its wooded site.
“And every time I come here it been this sort of warm almost spiritual feeling about these buildings, how they tie into the landscape. But I also feel it represents something that we’ve lost and especially as we are closing it,” he said.
Halliwell no longer fits into the current model of a modern school with all of today’s safety concerns and St. Jean said its students will find that the new spaces for them at North Smithfield Elementary School and the middle school are “going to be fantastic,” he said. “But we’re also losing something important with Halliwell,” he said of the school’s natural setting.
School Committee Chairman James Lombardi III, told the crowd outside the school that it had gathered “to say goodbye to Dr. Harry L. Halliwell Memorial School, and noted “we are sad to see closure to this chapter with so many memories,” even while knowing for many years the school must be shutdown.
“This is very unfortunate as many children love the campus-like feeling, including my three children who went through Halliwell. Hopefully we can re-purpose this facility for our community soon,” he said.
And School Committeewoman Jean Meo, who has dealt with Halliwell as a local school during her many years on the committee, told the gathering “This is an end an era for my children and my grand children who have attended here.
“Saying goodbye is always sad, but all of us have our own special memories and those memories will live on. All the learning and teaching and fun that have taken place inside and outside of these walls is Halliwell’s legacy and it’s a proud legacy – a part of our community’s history, and a piece of our hearts forever,” Meo said.
Later, as she worked with some of school’s staff such as James Fournier, the school’s custodian, to recover a time capsule the school’s staff and students buried near Halliwell’s memorial stone in the lawn around the school flag pole in 1996, O’Hara said she has no intention of letting Halliwell’s memory fade with the closing of his school.
“I intend to see his name incorporated in some way at the North Smithfield Elementary School,” she said. “I won’t let his name die, not in this town,” O’Hara said.