Fort
Zumwalt School District
The earliest settlers of the
area were too far removed from any formal schools and had little
interest in agriculture since hunting and trapping afforded the most
profitable livelihood. It was not until 1833 with
the large immigration of German-born settlers that farming became the
number one livelihood. There were no public schools
during this period, and the people were not as generally educated as
they are today. Most parents made an effort to teach
their sons how to read, write, and have working knowledge of numbers,
but could only do this if they themselves could read and
write. This was not always the
case. As more educated German farmers came into the
area, there was more desire on their part for their children to be
educated and as soon as they were able, they built crudely constructed
schools from logs or hewn timber with roofs of clapboard shingles.
By necessity, the school term
was centered on the winter months as the young men and boys were
required for the planting and harvesting of
crops. Wind often carried snow under the shingles
and into the loft. As it melted, students were
hard-pressed to find a dry place in which to
study. There was only one room for all the students
of all age levels. Poor roads and much work to do
provided for a relatively isolated life. Community
ties were strong and everyone knew their neighbors from miles
around. One of the earliest records of these small
one-room schools was of the Mt. Hope School on the Salt River Road (Now
Highway P), which opened sometime around 1837. It
could not be called a free public school at its beginning for there
were no free public schools in Missouri until the Geyer Act of
1839. It remained in its original size for over a
hundred years and it closed in 1940 because of the public school's
consolidation.
The German-born immigrants
brought with them their customs, their religion, and their language and
many of these farmers sent their children to the Catholic schools at
All Saints, St. Paul, and Old Monroe. Some of the
students spoke and used German in the schools and there was still some
study done in German into the early 1900's. The
formation of Assumption Catholic Church in 1871 was as much for the
purpose of building a school as it was for the place of worship.
The
earliest public school in O'Fallon was built in 1869 in the area known
as Convent Park on the grounds of St. Mary's
Institute. Julius Reichenstein was employed as the
first teacher by the townspeople. In 1910 O'Fallon
outgrew the one-room school and built a new school at the corner of
West Pitman and School Streets. By 1947, the town
again outgrew the school and the one-room school was replaced with the
brick building that still stands on the site.
In 1947 a school district
reorganization law was enacted which required each county in the state
to elect a board of education that would be responsible for developing
a county plan of reorganization. The St. Charles
County Board of Education proposed combining twelve small districts to
form one large district. Voters approved the
formation of this district, the Central School District R-II, in 1949
but in 1966, the Board of Education changed its name to the Fort
Zumwalt School District. Joseph L. Mudd was the
first superintendent of R-II.
Prior to 1959, O'Fallon's
public school students had to go to St. Charles for their high school
education. Fort Zumwalt High School held its first
classes in the 1959-1960 school year in the building that now houses
North Middle School.