Empty desks stacked in pairs line the walls of a classroom. Boxes labeled with black marker and packed with end-of-the-year clutter fill the corners, destined for another school. On the whiteboard, “Good bye Franklin” is written in looping letters.
While now the hallways of Franklin Academy are dim and still, save for a row of surplus chairs and the quiet hum of an empty building, just two weeks ago, they echoed with the excitement of students eager to start summer vacation.
On May 30, students walked through the school’s front doors for the last time, marking the end of a 204-year legacy. Now, the once-bustling school awaits a new purpose as Columbus Municipal School District begins exploring how it can be redeveloped.
While it is still unclear what the school will become, CMSD Board of Trustees President Robert Smith is certain of what it won’t be.
“We’re not going to just let it sit there and be an eyesore to the community,” Smith told The Dispatch.
Franklin’s closure reflects a larger consolidation the school district is undertaking after years of declining enrollment. In the last decade, CMSD enrollment has dropped by 25%, and its five elementary schools each operate at 50% capacity or below.
With the help of a $36 million bond taxpayers approved last year, the district is making improvements at three of its elementary campuses and opting to close Franklin Academy and Fairview Elementary.
That decision, Smith said, is a matter of fiscal responsibility. The district spends more than $95,000 annually to operate Franklin and another nearly $80,000 each year on utilities. A facilities study commissioned by the district in December 2023 estimated it would take about $12.9 million to make the improvements the school needs.
“I don’t think that it’s ever been totally renovated the way it should have been,” Smith said. “I think over the years, they’ve used what you call a band-aid approach.”
A legacy built from the ground up
Franklin was established through a section of the legislative charter for Columbus, which called for it to be funded by the lease of lots in what is now the downtown area, which sits on 16th Section land.
When it opened in 1821, students went to class in a 20-by-30-foot unsealed structure. It was expanded in 1835 to two buildings, one for female and one for male students. The current red brick building was constructed in 1938. In 1965, more than 10 years after Brown v. Board of Education, the school was integrated by the Jamison and Doughty families.
In many ways, Franklin represented the city’s earliest ambitions. Kai Schafft, a professor of education at Penn State University who studies the role of schools in rural community development, said the purpose schools serve in a community often goes beyond educating students.
Schools provide a sense of identity to community members, Schafft said, being a hub for social activity, a frequent venue for civic engagement and a driver of economic development.
“There’s been work done that has shown that the presence of a school within a rural community has positive impacts on levels of business activity and entrepreneurship, and that these outcomes are stronger in smaller communities,” he said.
That rings especially true for Mississippi University for Women, which is the nation’s first public university for women and the city’s largest employer.
Only a half-mile from Franklin, the university has also faced an uncertain future. Proposed legislation to fold the university into Mississippi State University sparked public outcry in 2024 and raised concerns about preserving the city’s longstanding history of educational leadership.
In the late 1980s, stakeholders campaigned hard to make Columbus home to yet another educational first. As a result, the state’s only residential high school for academically gifted juniors and seniors was established on the campus of MUW. Annually, it’s ranked as one of the highest performing high schools in the nation, yet it also is at risk. The State Board of Education this year recommended the legislature relocate the school to Mississippi State University. The relocation is pending legislative approval.
Because schools make up many of the ties that hold a community together, Schafft said their closure can also be a threat to the city’s identity.
“I think that the closure of a rural school has a lot of different kinds of significance,” he said. “Certainly economic significance, but also really a lot of social and symbolic significance because of the ways in which schools, particularly in rural areas, tend to help define a community’s identity.”
If not an eyesore, then what?
“I thought in the beginning that people would be raising cane, but I haven’t heard a lot of complaints about it,” Smith said of the decision to close Franklin. “People have asked me, ‘Are y’all planning on selling it? What’s the future plans?’”
The district is brainstorming ideas of ways the school can be repurposed to continue benefiting the community.
To do that, outgoing Superintendent Stanley Ellis said the district will enlist community members’ input through surveys and possibly form a committee to help brainstorm ideas for repurposing the building. Smith believes the PryorMorrow architectural firm, which is coordinating the district’s bond projects, will also be an asset in the process.
“Once we get some of these (bond-funded) projects up and rolling, let (PryorMorrow) give us some ideas as to what they think the district can use it for, whether it’s for office spaces in the future (or) whatever they think it could be used for,” Smith said.
Among ideas like residential and office space, the board of trustees has also looked to similar historical schools that have closed and been repurposed, particularly the Duling School in Jackson.
The Lorena Duling School, which was built in the 1920s, closed in 2005. The same year the passing of the Mississippi School Property Development Act, which allows districts to reap the revenues of redeveloped educational properties, allowed a developer to step in to repurpose the school.
Today, the property is a multi-use facility that houses venue spaces, restaurants, offices and retail shops while also commemorating the building’s original purpose. Steve Davis, principal architect at Canizaro Cawthon Davis, the firm who designed the redevelopment, said the main goal of the design was ensuring the property retained its status as a landmark building in the community.
“Everyone in the neighborhood went to the school when they were children and were very concerned when it was announced that it was going to be closed and sold to a developer,” Davis told The Dispatch. “There was a lot of concern in the community about what they were losing.”
Davis said the design team worked alongside Mississippi Department of Archives and History to keep the design as close to the original as possible. Only necessary repairs were made to the exterior. While retailers and restaurants take up interior space, Davis said corridors and old classroom schools still make it feel like you’re standing in a historic school.
In Huntsville, Alabama, the former Stone Middle School campus, which served students from 1951 to 2009, was also redeveloped into a multi-use commercial facility. Renamed for the local zip code, Campus No. 805 now houses a restaurant, a brewery, entertainment and retail spaces while also retaining the campus feel of the former school.
Jessica White, a historic preservationist consultant for Huntsville, called the project a “Cinderella story” for the city.
“Reinvestment in our core is smart business. It’s good for the environment, saves costs on new infrastructure and promotes economic development. But, it also preserves our sense of place,” White said in a 2017 city press release. “A mix of old and new buildings is what gives us a sense of identity, history and authenticity. We don’t want to be like every other place. Retaining what we love while making strategic improvements helps us meld the past with our future.”
Retaining some sort of purpose to the community, Schafft said, can be essential to successfully repurposing the school. He recalled a school in rural Pennsylvania that was closed and reopened as a sort of community center with small shops, spaces for town meetings and a farmers market.
“That’s good because you don’t want to have a larger, empty building sitting in your community if you can avoid it, but it’s a far cry from having an active, functioning school filled with students and teachers and educational leaders and providing employment for the local residents and a place for kids to go to school,” Schafft said.
Even with a successful, sincere redevelopment effort, losing a school can be difficult for students, parents and the community, Schafft said, especially when the institution is saturated with shared history.
“It’s an important part of local identity (and) local heritage,” Schafft said. “So it seems to me that you would want to preserve that however you could. It’s not a one-size-fits-all situation. To the extent possible, I think that it’s in everyone’s best interest for the community to have as much of a sense of agency over what happens to the building and that legacy as they can.”
‘Too significant to abandon’
For more than eight generations, local attorney Katherine Kerby said her family has attended, worked in and lived nearby Franklin in a historic home catty-corner to the school. She recalls her aunt, Leah Kerby, walking across the street to teach third-graders for the majority of her nearly 50-year career.
If the current building remains shuttered with no redevelopment effort, Kerby worries community members, especially those with direct ties to the school, would feel like the property and its history have been forgotten.
“The children who graduated there are impressed and the people who have lived here are (impressed with) the pride of community in having created and sustained for 200 years the first free public school in the state,” Kerby said. “And it’s in a state that is trashed by the rest of the world for lack of education, but we have a shining star. Some aspects should be more than just the plaque out front.”
Across the street from Franklin, the Kerby home is currently being renovated into townhomes, perhaps reflecting progress that could soon come to Franklin. The home still bears the imprint of its shared history with the school, like its porch, where residents used to watch students play outside after school.
With whatever is in store for Franklin’s future, Kerby believes that the shared history the community has built around the school cannot be forgotten.
“There should be some physical representation of the amazing success of the citizens of Columbus in free public education for 200 years through many wars, through social turmoil, through changes of every imaginable kind,” she said. “The number of children that learned there – it’s a monument to them, and it matters to those children.”
McRae is a general assignment and education reporter for The Dispatch.
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Quality, in-depth journalism is essential to a healthy community. The Dispatch brings you the most complete reporting and insightful commentary in the Golden Triangle, but we need your help to continue our efforts. In the past week, our reporters have posted 35 articles to cdispatch.com. Please consider subscribing to our website for only $2.30 per week to help support local journalism and our community.
