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Augusta Magazine
Leslie Olig
December 2008
Heritage Academy started as the seemingly impossible dream of two dedicated educators. Thanks to their hard work and the philanthropy of an entire community, that dream is today a reality.
Yolanda Pinkney sends her fifth-grade son to Heritage Academy. To get him there, she has to make sacrifices—not easy with four children to consider. “I have to support him financially. It is a sacrifice, but I look at it as a priority,” she says. “I want to do it. I have to do it.”
For her sacrifice, Pinkney is able to drop off her son and drive away with peace of mind. “He is in a safe, clean environment,” she says. “This is his first year. It’s done wonders.” Not only is Pinkney making sacrifices for her son’s tuition, she is buying uniforms and providing his daily lunch and transportation. On Monday, Wednesday and Friday, she and her four children—three of them under the age of four—get up at 6:15 a.m. in order for her son to get to his violin lesson at 7:30 a.m. “That’s definitely a sacrifice. I am always rushing. But he tells me, ‘Thank you Mama,’ he really does.”
Like Yolanda Pinkney, parents who intend to send their children to Heritage are told that sacrifices are expected. “Everyone here is having to give up something, but it’s worth it,” says Dr. Linda Tucciarone, the school’s executive director. “It gives them dignity and it gives me accountability.”
However, tuition doesn’t seem to be an issue for parents who have considered the alternatives. “[Public school] was a consideration because it’s free,” says Norma Miller, whose grandchild, Donnyell, is in fifth grade. But her experiences as a substitute teacher in public school led her to seek alternatives. ”I was looking for a safe haven. The world has gotten crazy, out of control,” she explains. “When I drive off, I don’t want to have to worry about what is happening inside the building.”
Although every family must pay, the income-based tuition collectively represents about 25 percent of the school’s operating costs. “Ordinary citizens are making up the rest,” says Dr. Tucciarone. “We all want to help these people. These are Augusta’s future.” Jan Hitchcock is the school principal. Nine years ago, she was an inner-city missionary. Through Fireside Ministries, she and her husband, Phin, were helping young men and women earn their general equivalency diploma (GED). At about that same time, Dr. Tucciarone—a friend of the Hitchcock’s— was teaching at a private school. She began tutoring inner-city students. Eventually, their separate experiences came together in a conversation. “The need was so obvious. Linda approached us and she said, ‘What do you think about starting an inner-city Christian school?’”
“They said, ‘Sure, how do you do that?” recalls Dr. Tucciarone, who not long afterward quit an enviable teaching job in a private school. Then she visited Circle Rock school in Chicago. “We started talking to anyone who would listen,” Hitchcock says. “Then we went to Circle Rock in Chicago. It’s in one of the poorest neighborhoods in the city.” The Circle Rock school became a model as well as a starting point. “We opened in 2000 with five kindergartners. We had 10 by the end of the year,” she says. “We’ve added a grade every year. Next year, we’ll add an eighth grade.”
Opening a school changed Hitchcock’s mission from intervention to prevention, she says, adding that their previous mission to help young adults earn their GED was full of obstacles. “So much of their lives had dysfunctional patterns. It was just hard and we would only have a handful get their GEDs,” she says. So the chance to change younger lives was very appealing. “The earlier we get them, the better,” she says. “We know the children and their families. When we get to know so much about each child, it makes us a family.”
Now in its eighth year, Heritage is an independent, non-denominational Christian school with the mission of providing a private education experience to lower income families. It is likely what John W. Houghton envisioned in 1853 when he bequeathed the funds to build a school for a free education.
Houghton moved to Augusta in 1830 from Boston, Mass. He was a 43-year-old bachelor. For 21 years he managed a successful leather and shoe shop on Broad Street. He later shared his prosperity with the city. When he died in 1851, he bequeathed $4,000 to the city of Augusta “for the erection of a brick school house...purpose of said school to be free for all the poor children of said city and to be open on the Sabbath to all denominations of evangelical Christians for divine worship or for prayer meeting.” The school opened in 1853 with a male teacher for the boys and a female teacher for the girls. The school’s opening ushered in Augusta’s public education system. On March 22, 1916, the school was destroyed by fire, which also devastated about 700 downtown buildings. When the school board agreed to rebuild, they purchased two lots east of the original location. The new school became a memorial to Houghton. The plans for the new school included moving his remains from his Gracewood farm to the foyer of the new Houghton Elementary School. In the 1930s a plaque was dedicated in his memory which read:
John W. Houghton 1787-1851. “In the memory of John W. Houghton, a citizen of Augusta whose love for children and whose endowment for their education are here made manifest. This tablet is erected in loving appreciation by those who have profited by his benefactions. If you seek his monument, look around you.”
It was the day before Christmas in 2005 when Dr. Tucciarone walked into an abandoned building that she had passed every day for six years. She didn’t even need a key. “We just walked in. The building had never been secured,” she says. “Clearly people were living here.” With her was the building’s new owner, Clay Boardman of Augusta Capital LLC, who had recently partnered with Historic Augusta and the Augusta Downtown Development Authority to purchase the old Houghton Elementary School. His philanthropy spared both the building and the surrounding Olde Towne neighborhood from a low income housing project.
But as Dr. Tucciarone passed graffiti-covered walls and falling plaster to finally stand among what had been the roof, she had to be honest. “We have no money,” she says. As they continued the tour, hope reached her in the form of a memory. It was the memory of the first chapel ever held by Heritage Academy. “It was about dreaming big,” she recalls.
Who better to instill big dreams than the man who restored Augusta’s Enterprise Mill, a project that represents the salvage of a 236,000-square-foot factory building that had been abandoned for nearly 25 years? Pledging some of his own money to start, Boardman helped the school organize a capital campaign. With significant donations from the Knox and Morris Communications foundations, it didn’t take long to reach $2.65 million—enough to buy the school and to make repairs to the first floor. The effort was personal for Boardman. After all, his grandfather, Clayton “Tater” Boardman, had been a student at Houghton. The school, once considered an endangered property, was now a school again.
The transformation of a 91-year old school took local contractor Rick Allen and a crew from R.W. Allen & Associates 190 days working alongside countless volunteers who put in 12,000 hours of their time. Some came from as far away as Illinois. Most were closer to home and under the coordination of the school’s co-founder, Hitchcock, who likes to fix things. The community effort included volunteers from First Presbyterian Church, Fort Gordon, Church of the Good Shepherd, Young Life Ministries, Berean Baptist Church, Warren Baptist Church, Trinity on the Hill Methodist Church, the Rotarians, Kiwanians, Aurora Christian Schools in Aurora, Ill., and Trinity on the Hill’s F.R.O.G.S (Five Retired Older Gentlemen Serving).
With fresh paint, new windows and a new roof, Heritage is now the poster child for downtown revitalization. “I firmly believe it is a key component in the education of our community and of downtown redevelopment,” says Augusta Mayor Deke Copenhaver. “I think the story is one of sacrifice and of service when you consider the volunteer hours it took for the rehabilitation of the building. It shows you what can be done by this community. It will be a blessing to the city for generations to come.”
Recently, the school hosted a press conference at which Historic Augusta announced its annual list of endangered properties—a list from which Heritage itself was spared. Boardman, a former president of Historic Augusta, is pleased. “He is so excited that we actually returned a building to its original use,” says Anne Catherine Murray, project manager for Augusta Capital LLC, Boardman’s capital venture company responsible for saving Enterprise Mill. “He had family who went there. His grandfather went there. I think he would have done it regardless, but he didn’t have that family connection when he did Enterprise Mill.”
Katie Griffin who teaches third and fourth grade calls it a gift from God. “We tell them that this is such a great gift given to you by God,” she says. “About 95 percent understand that— that every day is a gift.” The little things are what set the school apart. Classes offered in Latin, violin and bridge comprise the kind of attention to detail that convinced Lithia Wallace, the school secretary, to send her son to Heritage. “What sets us apart is God. We hold up a belief that is Godly and we teach our children to put God first.”
When they wear their uniforms, when they complete their assignments, the rhythm of their lives is healthy,” Hitchcock says. “Faithfulness in little things is a great thing.” This from the woman who took faithful prayer walks around a dilapidated building with her friends. Faithfulness bears fruit, she says. And she could tell stories. One is about a student who could barely speak. Another is about a parent who now wants to get an education. “In God’s grace and wisdom, we don’t know all the outcomes,” she says. “Someday we are going to reap the fruit of the lives we are saving.”
One day, 9-year-old Nygl Eaddy hopes to donate money to his school, but until that day he sometimes sells lemonade to help his mother pay school tuition. “I sell lemonade on really hot days,” he says. “Sometimes I sell all day.” Nygl, the eldest of four, explains that his father is absent from his life and not a Christian. “My mother keeps saying that one day, he’ll know the Lord and we can be a family again.”
Until then, he makes sacrifices to help his mom. “I try to cheer her up. I take out the trash, do the dishes, clean up my room and look after my sisters,” he says. “This is how a normal life should be. Other kids, they grow up without self-control. Here, they teach me more responsibility. I get my strength from this school and prayer.”
Now a fourth grader, Nygl began attending Heritage Academy when he was a kindergartner. Sitting on new furniture and surrounded by polished floors and fresh paint, he remembers when classes at Heritage were held in rented spaces. “This is a whole lot better than the last school,” he recalls. “It was so small. We were mushed up. The teachers would get frustrated.”
And while a new school building was something he never expected to see, he thinks the transformation of the school’s new home on Greene Street has been exciting. “I helped with that,” he says, pointing to brightly-colored playground equipment. “They invited the children to help, so I set out tools. I put in screws, I built some of the stairs. It was a really fun time.”
Nygl will attend Heritage Academy until he is in the eighth grade, which is the last grade level offered, but he is sure he will visit his old school, especially since he has three younger sisters who will follow him. “I feel so excited that I am helping the community and other children,” he says. It’s a piece of my childhood that I will leave behind.”
Editor’s Note: For information on donations and volunteer needs at Heritage
Academy call (706) 821-0037.
