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Sitting just off the Highway in Hall Summit, Louisiana is the long-time abandoned Hall Summit School. This beautiful old school and gymnasium has sat unused for years and is slowly falling in on itself from the inside out.
Hall Summit School and Gymnasium
I couldn’t find much information on the school. There are several different references to the school closure. But I found a comment from a Facebook user that posted a snippet from an article about a Red River Parish bond that was past to consolidate all the schools in the Parish into one elementary school, middle school, and high school. This caused the school to close in December 2001 and in January 2002 all the students were sent to the Red River Parish Schools. I’m still researching what schools were closed, but I know this affected Hanna School and Martin School (I haven’t been there yet and it’s on my list next time in the area).
From various people on the Louisiana Facebook Groups, Hall Summit School was falling apart before it closed for good. Multiple people said it was falling down from the inside. Some parts of the buildings were so weak that when the wind blows the buildings would shake.
If you know more about the school or want to share your experience share them here, comment below.
My Visit
During my visit, I didn’t have much time to take a closer look. I decided not to walk around the chain across the drive to closer pictures. All pictures were taken from the public easement. I plan to visit during the winter months so most of the vegetation has died back.
About the Images
I used my Sony a6000 and my Sony SELP18105G E PZ 18-105mm F4 G OSS lens. The images were then edited with Adobe Lightroom CC, Topaz Labs Denoise AI and Topaz Labs Sharpen AI, Aurora HDR (no longer available but still a great product), and Luminiar Neo to clean up the images.
About James
I taught in the school in 1993. Yes, the floors could be creaky in places, but the school was overall in pretty good shape for a building of its age. The roof didn’t leak, the heating system was reliable, the electrical system had been totally redone (it was all modern wiring in modern galvanized conduit), and the gym had both a brand new roof and a brand new wooden floor. Every classroom was air conditioned with a window unit (one reason for the new electrical system) and the cafeteria building and elementary school wing (the latter now demolished) were relatively recent 1950s construction, less than 30 years old at the time.
The core reason it was shut down was not because it was falling apart but, rather, because there was not enough students. The graduating class was 5 students the year before I taught there. I taught every single math class from 7th grade to 12th grade. That’s six grades in case you’re wondering. We could not teach things like Advanced Placement Calculus like most Tier 1 engineering colleges require because there was only one me, the only math teacher in the entire school, and my time was entirely booked. There was not enough ADA (Average Daily Attendance) money to pay for a second math teacher, because there weren’t enough students.
There was no way I could effectively teach six totally different math classes at the same time, I had to take a lot of shortcuts to make sure each class’s lesson plan at least had some sort of coherency. No, it was *not* “Turn to page 143 and do the odd number problems”, when you’re teaching algebra or geometry you have to work the kids through the problems (“guided instruction”) or else they aren’t getting it. I got pretty good at winging it, but nothing like what I could have done if I’d had enough time in the day to give each class the prep it deserved. I didn’t, even working 12 hour days most of the school year. Just creating and grading tests was a huge effort for six different classes.
Centralizing all the high school students into Coushatta High School (and renaming it to “Red RIver High”, apparently) meant that students had the opportunity to take classes that they could have never taken at Hall Summit or Martin or Hanna because there just weren’t enough students. It required the school bond to expand Coushatta High to be big enough for all the high school students as well as build the new elementary school for all of the elementary school students, but the end result is the kids having the opportunity for a much better education (not that all of them take advantage of that opportunity, of course). They have *four* math teachers, and each math teacher has a reasonable number of preps. They don’t know how good they have it….
Thanks so much for sharing your experience at the school. It’s appreciated and it’s impressive how you had you made the teaching experience work. As to the reason why I listed the school closer, these were from former students and they probably imagined the problems with the campus were a lot bigger than they were. I recently found some information that said several other schools in the Parish were consolidated and sent over to Coushatta. All of those schools now sit empty and were beautiful schools. I recently was able to visit those other locations and hope to be able to get permission to enter the schools.
Once I have time to research the schools and edit the image from those visits, I will update this article.