End of an era

• By CAROL ANNE BLITZER
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: Jul 16, 2009 - Page: 1D

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Robert E. Lee Junior-Senior High School opened in the fall of 1959 to the oohs and aahs of students, parents and architects with the U.S. Office of Education, which recognized it as an outstanding example of the adaptation of a building to a natural site.

That site includes a deep ravine through the center of the property and a swamp on the property’s edge.

Fifty years later, Lee High is no more. In May, the East Baton Rouge Parish School Board voted 9-1 to close the facility.

Even though state LEAP test scores had improved over the past years, the school did not reach the state’s minimum performance score of 60. The risk was great that the state would take over the school.

Enrollment was also down. Lee High was designed for 1,500 students but closed with only 630.

It was a sad day for thousands of students who attended Lee High over the decades, especially the small group of alumni, now in their 60s, who were there when it opened.

Lee High was designed in the “California style” on a 26-acre tract the school board had purchased in 1940, when real estate in the Highland Road area was cheap.

“Architecturally, it was an excellent design,” said Nancy Jo Poirrier, who taught at the school from 1959-1966. “Functionally it was a disaster. It was a California design built in a Louisiana swamp.”

One of the biggest problems was that the ravine was 8 feet lower than Lee Drive, on which the property fronted. Engineers concluded it would be cheaper to build the school over the ravine than to fill it.

The architectural firm of Miller, Smith and Associates designed the building, which was constructed for a mere $12.67 per square foot, about the same cost of building an average brick house at the time. The total price was $2,282,430 plus $15,000 for landscaping and $58,000 for the football field, bleachers, outdoor lighting and paved play area.

Rainy days at Lee High were a mess, especially when the low areas flooded. “The football and track field was higher than the gym, and the gym was higher than the classrooms,” said Miriam Maxwell Juban of the Class of 1964.

The gym flooded before it was ever used. Juban’s classmate Ray Smith, who had come to Lee High from St. Agnes Catholic School, remembers walking into the gym on his first day of school and seeing buckled floors.

“My first job at the school was to knock down the floor boards and stack them in the corner,” he said. “That was our P.E. for the first two days of school.”