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The threat of state takeover prompted the East Baton Rouge Parish School Board this spring to close crumbling Lee High for good. Many older alumni still staunchly defend the school’s former “Rebel” colors as harmless nostalgia, but such Confederate imagery prompted officials in 2006 to rename Lee the “Patriots.”

The letter jacket that Bill Collins first wore in high school is still bright blue, even though it’s been more than 30 years since he earned it. The glory glow of championship still travels across his graying, bearded face as he drapes the jacket over his shoulders, his spine rising slightly, if self-consciously, when he’s adorned with that woolen L.

It doesn’t seem that long ago.

On a recent visit to the campus, he invites a guest to the library. It was there that Billy, as Collins was known, courted Judy Sensat, who would become his bride and bear their three children. A few more steps take you to the gymnasium where they shared their first kiss. Collins and the other boys wrestled and gathered shining trophies for the gym’s buckling shelves.

Outside is a swath of land where once sat Lee’s distinctive, domed auditorium.

On a recent campus visit, walking a newcomer through Lee High history was bittersweet for the Collinses. Baton Rouge’s southeastern-most public high school is no longer—shut down after a half century.

Lee’s distinctive, domed 
auditorium failed the test of time.

Still, Bill and Judy Collins see themselves all over Robert E. Lee High School. They were kids there in the ’70s. Then they sent their kids to the school. Today, they remember all of it, yet look ahead to the day when Lee High’s rusty hull meets bulldozers, and all that isn’t deemed important by the East Baton Rouge Parish School Board is rubble. The records of who was in the National Honor Society. The medals and trophies. The cement benches commemorating a kid who lost his life too young.

Only the stories will remain.

“We’re getting older,” Judy Collins says. “We can tell our children, but who is going to tell our grandchildren?”

Modern by 1950s standards, Lee High’s buildings were in decline for years.

The school board finalized its decision to close the school on Thursday, May 21. The next day, teachers at the school cleared out their classrooms and polished résumés for a job fair designed to help them find work at other area schools.

Teacher Dale Richter spent that day packing up five Rubbermaid bins and six cardboard boxes of films, original documents and other tools he used to make American history come to life for his students, many of them from faraway places. In its last few years, Lee’s student population represented some 37 nations, and when it closed Lee had more than 100 international students on its rolls.

Richter wasn’t allowed to teach the Civil War here, at a school named for the crafty, daring general in the “war for southern independence.” Start teaching anything earlier than 1877, Richter says, and the kids won’t be ready for their state LEAP tests. The last couple of years at Lee have been all about the tests. Many of the teachers believed if they could raise scores, they could save the school.

“We were thinking that’s what it was all about, test scores,” Richter says.
But even though the test scores rose, the board still voted 9-1 to lay the old general to rest for good. A bitter irony: the school was climbing oh-so-close to the state’s minimum performance score of 60 when Baton Rouge school officials pulled the plug.

They could have kept Lee High open, but that would have meant risking the state taking over the school and scarfing up all the per-pupil revenue that goes with it. So, rather than risk that, they opted to shut down the school and scatter the students among the system’s other schools, thereby keeping their funding.

Nearly lost in all the politics was the fact Lee High School was one of a kind.

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Notable alumni

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Bill Bofinger used to walk a few paces from his house across Lee Drive and watch it being built. When the doors opened in 1959, Bofinger, then a freshman, was one of the first students to file into its gleaming, open-air hallways, where music replaced the sound of bells ringing to signal the end of class.

Nobody at the time expected air conditioning. Overhead exhaust fans pulled fresh air from the walkways into classrooms.

“This place was state-of-the-art,” he says. “It was cool.”

Cool. But also quirky. For instance, on day one everyone figured out that a driveway designed to conduct buses behind the school went beneath overhead walkways that would shear off the tops of the buses and was therefore unusable.

Bill Collins & Judy Sensat Collins. The Collinses met at Lee High and later married. Their children attended Lee as well.

Also, the school flooded whenever it rained. You could float in a canoe on the temporary lakes that followed a good thunderstorm, and some students did just that. The domed auditorium’s wooden floor buckled after the first flood, got replaced, buckled again, and finally was turned to tile.

Bofinger leans against a support beam in the wrestling room where he’s long rallied adolescent boys who push and plow their way to victory on sweaty mats. Since 1969, he’s coached them so well he was chosen for the National Wrestling Hall of Fame. He’s a tall guy with a rough, slightly ruddy complexion that would’ve served him well had he lived in the Old West. You get the feeling he could take any one of his students on this mat, right now.

Bofinger spent his entire teaching and coaching career at Lee High, and it’s hard for him to see it close. A natural storyteller, the coach keeps talking when his eyes begin to water. And then he is laughing again.

Jack Stokeld, Lee High principal, 1980 to 2003
On Lee's closing: "I just felt like sooner or later the time was coming when Lee would either be closing or redistricted to get more students in there. Even when you see things coming, you're still disappointed."
His fondest memory: "My association with the people there, my longtime secretary and assistant principal, and the fine students. I always told my faculty they were the best in the state."

Some of Baton Rouge’s best and brightest went to Lee High. Those include Mike Anderson, LSU football star and owner of Mike Anderson’s Seafood; state Sen. Dan Claitor, who quipped upon winning his election, “Not bad for a Lee High grad;” hair-styling tycoon Sam Brocato; and the most prominent celebrity of all, musician Randy Jackson, who used to be the bass player for the rock band Journey and now is a judge on American Idol.

Rumor has it that Coach Keaton at Lee High once told Jackson he’d better concentrate on football practice ’cause he sure wasn’t going to make any money playing that ole guitar.

“I’m glad he didn’t listen to that advice,” says Randy’s brother Herman Jackson, a McKinley High graduate who now teaches music at Southern University.

Bill and Judy Collins went out of their way to send their three gifted kids, Jessica, Brian and Jamie, to Lee High. They became active in the school’s booster club and school improvement team. All three of their kids graduated by 2003.

Some people say 2006 is when the school’s glory began to fade, when alumni support diminished. That was the year that political correctness caught up with Lee High, and school officials sensitive to growing anxiety over connotations of the school’s former “Rebels” mascot killed the general and declared the Lee High faithful “Patriots.”

Coach Bill Bofinger was on Lee High’s campus pretty much from the day it opened until the day it closed.

Long before that year, though, there were incidents. Like the time in 1963 when a group of kids set fire to the school office, which was located in the auditorium, and burned the building down. The auditorium was rebuilt, but not to high enough standards. After a few decades during which the administration watched chunks of the ceiling fall, the building was condemned and eventually torn down.

In 1971, there was a race riot at the school. The Collinses, who were students there at the time, recall the incident in frightened tones, almost reminiscent of the more recent Columbine tragedy. Bofinger remembers the incident starting as a lunchtime food fight after an announcer at an assembly made a racially charged comment.

“It went like wildfire, and we were locked in our classroom,” says Judy Collins.

The gloomy news of Lee High’s impending closure dampened, but did not spoil, the 45th anniversary celebration of the class of 1964, Lee’s first. As usual, the class celebrated at the Hawk’s Nest on Friday night in early June, and at Juban’s Restaurant the next night (co-owner Miriam Juban was a member of the class).

Today, Stephen Webre heads the history department at Louisiana Tech University in Ruston. In 1959, he was one of the 8th graders who strolled onto campus wide-eyed, awed by its modern architecture and the domed auditorium that hovered like a UFO. Pondering Lee’s closure recently, Webre shared his thoughts with classmates via e-mail as the reunion approached.

“It looked (in 1959) like the school of the future.  Now, I guess it’s the school of the past. … Taking in the news (of the closing), something occurred to me for the first time. Look at what we know just about our own single class. Consider the success we have enjoyed all over the country, and in some cases the world.  Many of us are influential in our professions and our communities. Multiply that by all the classes that Lee produced over the five decades. What if there had been a well-organized alumni association from the beginning. With strong leadership, such a body might have fought effectively to secure the resources the school needed to keep doing the fine job it did for us, and such a body would certainly have been well represented when it came to doing public battle with the school board over its ultimate fate.”

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Class of 1964 reunion

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Coach Bofinger, who was active and connected to the campus for all of its five decades, wonders if Lee High was plagued by some kind of bad luck. Did the school’s out-of-the-box design contribute to things going awry? Its often-painful, largely divisive name? Its students’ occasional allegiance to the rebel flag?

Nobody will ever know for sure.

What those who called the school home do know is they feel a palpable loss when they imagine not being able to come back and visit. Some places are far more than bricks and dirt. They are physical manifestations of who you were this year and this year and that year, as the years go by. And when these places are razed, you feel it to the bone.

Amy Alexander is a freelance magazine writer, columnist and poet.