The walls were the color of fresh buttermilk. It was the pale utility-yellow paint color commonly used on Florida schools in the 1960s. It was pleasing to the eye and seemed to fit with the surroundings. The entrance was an open-air atrium with a low brick wall and a thick hedge of various shrubs, including evergreens, sub-topicals and native cabbage palms. Other palm trunks lay horizontally on the ground and lined the beds around the perimeter of the buildings. The grass wasn’t a thick sod by any means, but a mixture of feral rye, sandspurs, Bermuda, Centipede and an assortment of grasses grown from surplus seed donated by maintenance at the Ponte Vedra Club and McCormick Grading. There was no irrigation system, and hoses were moved daily to various spots to deliver a trickle of water to the shrubs.
At the heart of it all stood the fountain. The three horizontal basins were tiered and supported by large pieces of chert rock originally mortared in place by Mr. Landrum and a few other men. The chert drew attention to the community’s roots, where nearby veins of it had been used for making spearheads and arrow points long before the Spanish arrived. The effect gave the fountain the feel of an artesian well-spring, similar to the fountain in Largo Park in Jacksonville’s San Marco.
Mr. Landrum’s rockwork sat across the breezeway from the main office at the school’s entrance; the wall behind the fountain was the south wall of the cafeteria. The garden was the Landrums’ contribution, and Mrs. Landrum maintained it with the help of students, the junior garden club, interested parents and others who recognized its significance as an integral part of Ponte Vedra/Palm Valley Elementary School.
The falling water set a tone and tempo for the entire atrium. The open-front hedge filtered the eastern breeze. The open environment helped dissolve the boundary between the outside and the inside and reinforced the idea that shelter meant shade and protection, not isolation and seclusion from the elements. The pond at the base of the fountain was algae-filled and held minnows Mr. Landrum netted along the bank of the lagoon behind his house. There were tadpoles, loud frogs and sometimes goldfish would be re-homed there. Turtles appeared regularly nearby.
Dragonflies, bees, butterflies and birds all took advantage of the freshwater microclimate. A flagstone path curved through the garden behind a privet hedge. It wasn’t unusual to be in the covered breezeway and see a hawk sitting on the upper rocks in the middle of the day. Once, an owl landed and stayed long enough for Mrs. Purcell to announce to the lunchroom to be quiet when returning to class and not disturb the bird.
This shady place, this “hammock” environment, was a teaching tool and the one central feature that seemed to hold the school together thematically. Each year in mid-August it would receive a replenishing and cleaning. Its presence was a functional metaphor: if education was important in Ponte Vedra and Palm Valley, which it was, then this atrium, this school, this enterprise, was its fountain of youth.
Improvements were underway, but some in the community were not happy about it. The School Board in St. Augustine wanted more control, and Mrs. Purcell was defending herself against opinions at the county that, as principal, she was running her school like a private academy. Ponte Vedra/Palm Valley Elementary School was growing. The independence and subsidiarity at play in the community were rubbing some of the newly elected officials at the county the wrong way. “You don’t tell the School Board what to do. The School Board tells you what to do” was the sentiment of some in St. Augustine. Others at the county seat dismissed PVPV as being too small to matter.
In the 1970s the school was ready for expansion, and the struggle for what that expansion would look like was a matter of vision. Who would control Ponte Vedra and Palm Valley’s fountain of youth? Mrs. Purcell believed it was the families, the teachers, the students and the local community at large that had the greatest stake in local education. The plan was for an additional wing of classrooms, but the county was offering a double-wide classroom trailer instead. “No, no, no. Absolutely not.”
It was pride of ownership, and to demonstrate the community’s commitment, clean-up of the school grounds was pushed to mid-August and taken care of by parents, students and volunteers. Not everyone in St. Augustine appreciated the school’s spirit. If there were advantages at PVPV Elementary exclusive to the school, that put other students in other parts of the county at a disadvantage and separated them as unequal within the countywide school system. It was a complex issue; it was growing, and it wasn’t going away.
Subsidiarity as a principle was being challenged. The idea that the School Board, as the governing authority, should only do what smaller, local groups cannot do for themselves, “keeping decisions at the lowest practical level” was shifting to a top-down approach, and Mrs. Purcell was holding her ground recognizing Ponte Vedra and Palm Valley had long been an educational outpost, disconnected from the rest of the county.
The community felt the relationship with the School Board was more of a collegial partnership than hierarchical. Ponte Vedra Beach was viewed by those south as an appendage of Jacksonville, and Palm Valley was that rural hammock wanting little to do with the goings-on outside its borders. It had been viewed this way since Don Diego Espinosa, “a citizen of St. Augustine,” established his ranch there in 1730.
In the 240 years between the time Espinosa enclosed his living quarters at the ranch with a wooden palisade, creating what would become Fort Diego, and the building of the school in 1959, its location was always considered isolated.
The attitude of some was that Ponte Vedra/Palm Valley Elementary School was still an experiment. But to locals it was a “milestone in the development of the two communities.” Enthusiasm on opening day was well-planned by the joint school committee members: Butler, Veley and Wern for Palm Valley; and Brown, LaMaster and Woolverton for Ponte Vedra. Itinerary item No. 5: “Children march into Classrooms from the Flag Pole Site, through lines of visitors and parents.”
PVPV Elementary was an open-air school, a stretched, modified and expanded version of the classic schoolhouse philosophy in two parts, two wings, with plans for the third. The parking lot was still crushed limestone gravel reflecting the summer heat, and the buildings were very sparsely landscaped. The school had an old boiler room, and there was a garbage incinerator, but it was rarely used. There were no curbs. There was no central air conditioning, but classrooms did have steam radiators and upper roof windows to capture the breeze and expel the heat depending on the season. Each classroom had a sink, a linoleum counter, and built-in wooden cabinets along one wall. The blackboards were slate, and some of the older surplus desks still being used had round holes on the upper right corner where glass ink wells would once have been inserted.
Some of us stood in a line that ran past the fountain as we waited for our turn in the main office, where a nurse and team were set up with jet injectors that looked like weapons. They delivered our smallpox vaccinations. We’re the ones with the distinctive circular scars that the live virus caused when compressed air blasted a high-pressure stream of liquid vaccine directly through the outer layer of our skin. It was incredibly fast.
The school grew and the county held firm on the temporary trailers being added where the third wing was always planned to be adjacent to the cafeteria. Other issues were pressing. The grass between the first and second wings was removed to create the library expansion and additional classrooms. The front parking lot was paved with asphalt increasing the heat on the front of the cafeteria, the main office and the atrium. But the fountain remained untouched.
It became a backdrop to photographs and a signal to new students and their families that conservation was an important part of the elementary school experience. It was a leftover, perhaps, from the time when the belief was that remaining open-air, close to the elements, was a choice, not a deficiency.
Sometimes, the things that some people think are too small to matter just need time to develop. Education can take many forms. Intuiting exponentials happens at the gut level. “The world does not understand how to intuit exponentials. New ones are forming now,” Sam Altman said recently. Sometimes things stay small for a very long time, then suddenly dominate. By the time the change becomes obvious, it is already huge and accelerating. Ideas can work this way. It just takes time.
Those who can develop even a rough feel for an approaching tipping point, or a fresh perspective, or a unique idea; and are willing to wait with confidence and patience, will gain a real advantage. It’s a model of understanding that sometimes early numbers can look unimpressive while the later numbers become transformative. It was Mrs. Purcell vision, and it was a driving force for two full generations in this smartly casual place of all places, Ponte Vedra Beach. Back to school. There’s work to be done.
