Published Tuesday, Nov. 16, 1999 Students who heard about the day's "special menu" hesitated before heading to the cafeteria -- only to find out the day's "special menu" was a brown bag lunch consisting of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, veggie sticks, an apple, a granola bar and milk.
Except for avoiding pigs' feet, students and teachers at South Pymatuning and Sharpsville's Seventh Street elementary schools tried to experience what school and life were like more than 60 years ago.
Many students and teachers wore period attire. Lights weren't used in many of the classrooms. Third-graders wrote with quill pens.
And worst of all perhaps, teachers were not allowed to use the copy machine.
While it was a test not to use copiers or to write with feathers, students and teachers alike learned how impossible it is to recreate a one-room schoolhouse education -- even for just one day.
Leonard, a 1945 Farrell High School graduate and a retired teacher, was accompanied by 1942 Sharpsville High School graduates Ed Susi and Virgil Rossi to explain what it was like to be a fourth-grader in the mid-to-late-1930s.
All three attended elementary grades in one-room schools.
They said the biggest difference was simply getting to and from school each day -- which wasn't so simple.
"We didn't have buses. Everyone walked," said Leonard. Susi added that while there were several schoolhouses in the South Pymatuning Township area, a mile-and-a-half walk to and from school was not uncommon.
As a result, Leonard said, students were better behaved. "When you got to school you just wanted to sit down," he said.
He added that students also did farm chores before the walk to school -- and then again after the walk home.
Leonard said the teacher was everything -- school nurse, multi-grade teacher and disciplinarian, among other things.
Inside the schoolhouse each grade was seated in a different row of maple and iron desks, Leonard said. When sixth-graders finished their work early, Leonard said, the oldest students helped the teacher by teaching the youngest students.
Among other things, the teamwork extended to cleaning ash from the pot-bellied stove that heated the school as well as keeping it filled it with wood and coal, Leonard said.
One bonus: The school year was only 150 days long.
The catch: Students had fewer days of school so they could help on the family farm or with work at home.
"We came from these kinds of places," Leonard said. "And it's these kinds of places that helped make America great."
The day was planned by the Sharpsville School District's Mercer County Bicentennial Committee.
