What happened to Webster School?

Are there any places in the life of a young child – beyond their home – that are as important, as formative, as their school? 

I don’t think so. 

Not for me, anyway.

In 1981, right around the time I turned five years old, my parents pulled up roots and moved from the Twin Cities to Williston, North Dakota. My dad’s employer, Benson Optical, was a large optical company and laboratory based in Minnesota – and they were looking to expand their footprint into more rural areas. They entered into an agreement to provide optical services to the Williston Eye, Ear, Nose & Throat Clinic. With this new partnership, people who visited the clinic for eye exams could buy their glasses right there from a licensed optician – who happened to be my dad. Before the age of 30, he was building and running an entire optical practice. 

We arrived in Williston just in time for me to start school. I attended kindergarten at Lewis & Clark Elementary, in a temporary classroom because the Williston Basin was in the middle of an oil boom and all the schools were overcrowded. I only have a couple of memories from kindergarten, but they are core memories. The first is the kindergarten reading program they used, called Alphaphonics. Its central character was an imaginary little man from outer space named Astro, and he, in the form of a cute little gray-faced doll with detachable ears, came to the classroom every day carrying a pink bag with that day’s lesson in it. He was specifically designed to help kindergarteners learn letters and their sounds, and let me tell you, he was wildly successful. 

This is a person in an Astro costume, but that's the Astro I remember!

The second core memory? On the days we started learning about a new letter, students were tasked with bringing something to class that began with that letter. On “A” day, my dad took the arm off one of my dolls and sent me to school with that. I think I might have been the only kid who didn’t bring an apple that day.

Anyway…this story is not about Lewis & Clark. It’s about my next school.

At some point during or just after my kindergarten year, my parents moved out of the apartment we were in and into a house. Which meant a new school for me. Around the corner stood a massive old school that would permanently etch itself into my personal history.

Webster School.

Built in 1909, Webster School had been around for so long it might have already been functionally obsolete when I started attending. It was three stories high with gables and tall skinny windows. The cafeteria was in the basement, the principal’s office was on the third floor, and there was so much wood that a single spark would have probably sent the whole place up in flames. It also featured a 1956 addition tacked onto one side. 

This is what Webster looked like when I attended school here.

I spent first, second, and half of third grade at Webster School. Memories from this time of my life include:

• Being the fastest girl in my grade and never turning down an opportunity to prove it -- especially at track & field day. At some point my mom worked at the school part-time and wore the Webster Wildcats mascot costume at track & field day. The head was made with a laundry basket and a gallon ice cream bucket that sat on her head like a hat.

• Playing “boys chase girls” in the schoolyard. A fun game until I tripped on the edge of the concrete basketball court and landed face first, breaking my front two teeth clean in half. Just as they’d finally finished growing in.

• Riding my Big Wheel around the neighborhood and giving it to a bigger boy to ride because he asked. I didn’t see that Big Wheel again until months later when I was out in the neighborhood with my dad and spied it in someone’s backyard. He got it back for me and I learned a hard lesson.

• Walking home for lunch every day and eating my grilled cheese sandwich in front of Sesame Street before heading back. (I lived right around the corner)

• Taking an IQ test to see if I qualified for the Talented and Gifted (TAG) program, and knowing what a zeppelin is but not knowing the temperature of the human body. Somehow Miss Anderson saw my potential anyway and took a chance on me.

• Playing on the playground and being approached by bigger kids, who asked if I wanted a cigarette. I did not. That nasty habit wouldn’t start until I was in college.

• Riding all over town on my fabulous green Schwinn bike with the motorcycle handlebars and brown banana seat, with not a care in the world. Sometimes my brother and I conquered Williston on our bikes together.

• Somehow getting lost in my own neighborhood and finally making it home – just in time for my favorite show, The Dukes of Hazzard. I was wearing corduroy pants and they chafed my inner thighs from all the walking.

• My brother, who was in half-day kindergarten at the time and out causing trouble as usual, and his friend throwing rocks at my second grade classroom and disrupting the teacher. Miss Kuester stormed out of there so fast, I was almost worried for my brother’s safety. Almost.

• My first grade teacher, Mrs. Velenchenko, went to my church and taught me how to skip count (count by 2s, 3s, 4s, etc, preparation for learning multiplication). That same year, during Fire Prevention week, we were shown a highly traumatizing film in the name of education. All it really did was make it impossible for me to sleep, especially with the terrifying old furnace right outside my bedroom door. Fun fact: it turns out I wasn’t the only one traumatized by this film. Apparently my entire generation was convinced its family would perish in a house fire while they slept.

• Spending so much time in the school library, reading Care Bears books and learning the song “Which Came First, the Chicken or the Egg?”

I left Webster School in the middle of the third grade when my family moved to another house, and my brother and I switched schools again. We were there until I finished the fourth grade. By then, the summer of 1987, the Williston Basin’s fortunes had turned and the oil boom had morphed into an oil bust. We moved back to Minnesota.

But I never forgot Webster School. My daughter and I visited Williston in the fall of 2022, and I discovered that the big old school was gone.

As I started work on my latest book, The Coal Room, I did a little research into what happened to Webster School in the years since I attended school there. I learned that in 1994, a heating malfunction caused pipes on the third floor to freeze and break in the frigid North Dakota winter. The resulting flood of water, seen running down the exterior brick and down the master staircase, caused such extensive damage that the whole building was deemed unsafe and demolished. All that remained was the 1956 addition, which lived on as a Head Start school for another 12 years, until 2006. A developer bought the building and converted it into residential condos. 

Hard to believe that used to be a school, isn't it?

It’s bittersweet to see the school that had meant so much to me as a child disappear the way Webster did. But time has a way of marching on, and memories are all we’re left with. I suppose that’s why I write the kinds of stories I do — to build a bridge back to those places, making sure the past and the people we used to be aren't forgotten.