Okay, this is my blog post to give you all the dirt on Abo Elementary, and trust me, there's already a lot of dirt on that school. I personally thought it was cool that we had a one-of-a-kind school in our little town. However, nothing prepared me for the jerks who were educated there.
A little background history: Abo was opened in 1962 during the Cold War. All the classrooms, cafeteria and other facilities were located underground so that it could serve as a fallout shelter. It was designed to be large enough to hold more than 2,100 people. In preparation for the "inevitable," the Artesia School District took their best teachers from the other schools and re-assigned them to Abo. ("If a nuclear warhead blows up near our town, our kids will still be able to get a first-rate education while waiting for the radiation to subside.") So, when the school opened, the students who got to go there actually received the best elementary education the town had to offer.
And that was the problem. The students from Abo were really full of themselves because they were living with the legend of the "Great Abo School," even though most of the teachers who were first brought over there had stopped teaching years before and were replaced with at least average-level teachers once it became more obvious there was no actual threat of nuclear annihilation.
That didn't stop them from thinking they were better than the students from Hermosa. Another problem was that there were more students who went to Abo than the other schools. This was due in part to people building new homes in the district so that their children could go there. I wonder if the development became so lopsided that they had to redraw school district boundaries and some students who used to go to Abo wound up in some other district.
Because there were so many Abo students, it was a challenge to get elected to be homeroom president at Zia. Whoever was elected from each class got to serve on the student council. It was 95% Abo students.
As for that rivalry between Abo and Hermosa schools, Yucca, Central and Roselawn students pretty much stayed out of the "which school is better" debate, because they didn't feel they had a horse in that race. It didn't help that Abo won the annual track meet among all the elementary schools every year.
Artesia used to have its students go to two separate locations for junior high school. Zia and Park. This presented a major problem of rivalries when they started to go to high school. The solution was to send the sixth and seventh grades to Zia and the eighth and ninth grades to Park. All this did was create a more intense Hermosa/Abo rivalry that got pushed up into the tenth grade and beyond. Yes, the petty argument over which elementary school was better still stuck around more than four years after the students finished fifth grade.
Because the rivalry between Hermosa and Abo lingered on into high school, the school board attempted to do what they had done with Zia and Park. Since there were five different schools, Each school would cover one grade each. First graders would go to one school, then to another for second and so on. That would get rid of the rivalries if everyone knows each other from the get go.
You probably remember how I wrote about Roselawn being made up primarily of Hispanic students because it was near the Catholic Church. Well, parents were in an uproar at the thought that their kids were going to have to go to school in that neighborhood for nine months. So that idea was nixed.
Eventually, Abo fell into disrepair and a decision was made to close it down and build a brand new school right next door. Hallelujah! The original plans called for them to fill in the Abo site with cement, but I think the logistics of pouring that much cement got in the way of reality and they never attempted it. The name of the new school is Yeso. My father's wife taught there for awhile.
So the school still stands. The outer building that students had to enter to go downstairs still has the name on the outside: "Abo Elementary School and Fallout Shelter." It feels like the school has never actually gone away and probably never will.
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