Clock is ticking on effort to save historic Bibb City school

Bibb City Elementary School, built just over a century ago, was like many public schools in the Chattahoochee Valley’s once-busy textile towns. They were built primarily to serve children from the neighborhoods — “mill villages” — that grew up around virtually every textile plant between LaGrange and Eufaula.

Many of those neighborhoods are still well populated, and quite vibrant, even though the mills they grew up around are closed, and in some cases demolished.

Bibb City Elementary closed 16 years ago after one of several closings of Bibb Mill, which shut down for good in 2006 and was destroyed by fire in 2011. Since 2001, the deteriorating school has been approaching the point of unsalvageability. Valiant efforts by retired science teacher Mike Edmondson to raise funds to save and restore the historic structure have fallen far short, and this week the Georgia Trust for Historic Preservation ranked Bibb City Elementary No. 2 on its 2018 list of Georgia’s historic “Places in Peril.”

In this case, imminent peril. As reported Thursday by Tim Chitwood, the roof is collapsing, threatening the structural integrity of the building’s brick frame, which remains intact — for now. But that can’t last if the roof continues to erode.

Edmondson’s original idea of converting the old school into a art and science center ran up against hard economic reality: Bibb Center Inc., incorporated to raise the estimated $8 million needed for that conversion, raised about $5,000.

Now, Edmondson said, it would take some $580,000 just to clear away rubble and hazardous materials and stabilize the building against further collapse. That’s more than three times the top property appraisal by the Muscogee County School District, which is trying to sell it.

Historic Columbus Foundation reportedly will meet with the school district to discuss ideas to save the building. But barring some miraculous and massively generous philanthropic intervention. Bibb City Elementary School seems destined to survive only in records, pictures and memories.

Swift justice

The first shoe has dropped in Worth County, Ga., after the infamous drug lockdown and body searches of high school students in April. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that a proposed settlement of $3 million, pending federal court approval, was announced Tuesday, to be paid out to the approximately 850 students subjected to police-state tactics that produced no drugs and no charges — except against some of the Worth County Sheriff’s Department officers responsible. The money will be paid from the county’s liability coverage through the Association County Commissioners of Georgia.

For the sheriff’s office, that might be the lighter shoe. The heavier one could fall when Sheriff Jeff Hobby, suspended Monday by Gov. Nathan Deal, and two of his deputies face criminal charges that could land them in prison.

That will for jurors to decide. In the court of popular opinion — and, apparently, in the opinion of school authorities who experienced the incident and county officials who saw it on surveillance video — this was not law enforcement. This was gross abuse of authority.

This story was originally published November 16, 2017 at 4:27 PM with the headline "Clock is ticking on effort to save historic Bibb City school."