This is the VOA Special English Education Report.

The Harrington School is an old one-room schoolhouse in the American state of Georgia. The building has not been used in years. Community leaders and even the local historical society lost hope that it could be saved.

AMY ROBERTS: “They said that the building just wasn’t worth saving, and you could just look at it and tell that it was going to fall any minute, so let’s tear it down.”

Amy Roberts has good memories of the school. She attended first grade there in nineteen fifty-three. That was a year before the United States Supreme Court ruled that schools had to be racially integrated. A number of states kept blacks from attending school with whites.

The Harrington School was built in nineteen twenty-five for black children on St. Simons Island. After the ruling, the children joined white students at St. Simons' other elementary school.