Bourg Elementary celebrates 100th birthday

Joan Matherne and Dona McKee, close friends whose estrangement prompted them to become pen pals for the past 25 years, reunited Saturday in the place they met, an institution part of life for generations of children and adults through its 100-year history: the Bourg School.

Matherne and McKee, along with Matherne’s husband Gary, were inseparable as they toured the elementary school amid a celebration that attracted close to 3,000 people, according to the principal’s estimate. It was at that location where Joan and Dona as first-time teachers from different backgrounds formed a friendship nearly a half-century ago that has persisted despite their divergent paths.

“She moved back to Houma …” began Matherne, now living in Baton Rouge. “… Two and a half years ago,” McKee says. “And I saw her once,” Matherne finished before they said in unison: “Twice.”

“We had (today) planned,” McKee added. “Especially at this age, (seeing each other is) a wonderful thing,” Matherne said.

Students and teachers with personal experiences at “the Bourg school” dating back to at least the 1940s showed up Saturday to celebrate the school’s centennial, and they eagerly revisited the past.

Some spoke fondly of “obedient” students of decades ago, another of the daily morning tradition that had the entire student body stand in the courtyard to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. Others remembered how longtime principal Louis Gueniot’s management style allowed young teachers “to flourish,” how he took naps each afternoon and that he wasn’t averse to playing jokes on his teachers. More so than years, those gathered used the school’s former principals as a reference to time.

“They didn’t have all of these buildings here,” said Ethel Daigle, who taught seventh grade at the school beginning in the late 1950s, pointing out what has changed with time. “All we had was one little main building. We were no more than 10 people on the faculty, but out of all of them, only two are left alive. So I’m really privileged to be here today.”

According to an unsigned, undated report titled “Bourg: A Grand Old Public School” found in the school’s library, the idea of Bourg Agricultural School was conceived in 1910 – the building for this project stands today as Bourg Elementary. Through the summer of 1924, the Bourg School was a vocational high school that taught agriculture to the boys and home economics to the girls. All students contributed janitorial work, such as retrieving firewood for the pot-belly oven.

Bourg Elementary in 2012-13 enrolled 502 students in classes spanning pre-kindergarten to fourth grade, according to state Department of Education data. Thirty-seven percent of its students were assessed at mastery or advanced levels, and 47 percent were rated as basic, as compared to standard grade-level expectations. The school received a 103.3 school performance score and was graded as an A, the third-highest-scoring elementary school in Terrebonne.

Principal Sandra LaRose guided her guests through school’s hallways. They walked past Disney-themed bulletin boards (“The Incredibles,” and student “Mouseketeers”) that hang on walls painted half red and half white, colors new to most in attendance, who were unable to agree on what shade the walls used to be (“possibly one of those ugly hospital greens,” McKee recalled) but they surely were not red and white.

Some remembered when the café-torium was added as a wing to the school. Many were unaware the school has expanded to resemble something like a college campus, with two supplemental buildings and seven portable classrooms sprawled out behind the school.

And the relocation of the administrative office to the first floor – done so visitors don’t have to walk by classrooms and up stairs to check in, a possible security lapse – was news to just about everyone on the tour.

“That was kind of a scary thing, so we transformed it,” said LaRose, principal since January after 10 years as master teacher, de facto vice principal.

Even LaRose was wistful. She recalled a conversation with students who thought it bizarre teachers once used chalk – which she said they only knew of as thick sidewalk chalk – to write on a board. Even the marker boards of a generation ago are being phased out in lieu of the interactive Promethean boards, she pointed out.

Outside the school, Bourg’s annual bazaar was staged. Arts and crafts vendors exhibited their work ahead of a makeshift stage that held four live bands. Jambalaya, hot dogs and hamburgers were served, and the school’s six-goal basketball court transformed into a gallery of fair-styled contest in the shadow of a rock-climbing wall.

But it was inside where people were overtaken by their memories, where they exchanged stories and where they reacquainted themselves with an evolved, but true, icon from their past.

“I think that having a building that has been running in this community for 100 years represents the close-knit families and the close-knit community that the Bourg area has,” said LaRose, a Houma native. “It is a people like no other. The people in this community take pride in what they have. I think seeing this building and the reason I like to continue to take care of it and carry out the tradition of Bourg School is because it represents what these people are all about.

“They are about family. They are about sharing. They are about history. And I think that is what (the centennial) represents. It gives the people who aren’t just going to walk through the doors an opportunity to come back, and it gives them a reason to come back.”