JACKSON – The school district is inviting all current and former students, families, staff, and community members to a special event to honor the Christa A. McAuliffe Middle School as it prepares to close at the end of this school year.
The “Honoring McAuliffe” event will be held on June 16 with an open house from 4-6 p.m. with a ceremony starting at 6 p.m. The school is located at 35 South Hope Chapel Road.
“We hope the community will come out to spend a few moments walking the halls, visiting old classrooms, talking with each other, and replaying their memories of this special place,” Allison Erwin, the district’s coordinator of communications and technology said. “We will also be holding a ceremony at 6 p.m. to come together to honor what this school has meant to us all.”
Erwin added that as part of the event, the district is also collecting memories to include in a video slideshow.
The school opened in 1993 and was named in honor of Christa McAuliffe who was the first school teacher in space. She and six other astronauts were on board the Space Shuttle Challenger when it exploded after launch in 1986.
Inside the front entrance of the school, a wall bears her famous quote: “I touch the future, I teach.” It was selected as a National Blue Ribbon School in 2001-2002.
The McAuliffe Middle School is the second Jackson School District school to close in two years, as the district struggles to survive $22.4 million in state aid cuts and rising costs over the past seven years. The closure was part of a district-wide reconfiguration that was necessary to lower operating costs.
The front lobby of the Christa McAuliffe Middle School displays a famous quote by the teacher the school was named after. (Photo courtesy Jackson Schools)
This reconfiguration also included the merging both high schools into one for the coming school year, the merging of all 7th and 8th graders into one school and the merging of all 5th and 6th grades into one school. The district’s elementary schools will educate students from preschool to 4th grade.
In October 2024, a similar bittersweet event was held to honor the students, educators and staff past and present at the Sylvia Rosenauer Elementary School when it closed.
Hundreds of people came out and participated in a “Walk to Remember” through the school. As they passed through the hallways, they read bulletin boards filled with messages. Photos were on display and a video presentation was viewed in the school’s library. Members of the school’s PTA served up refreshments as students, parents and school employees reminisced about their time at the school.
A time capsule marker is one of many artifacts of the Christa McAuliffe Middle School that will soon be closed for budgetary reasons. (Photo courtesy Jackson Schools)
As is the case with the McAuliffe Middle School, the School Board and administration had no desire to close the school and put it up for sale. The state had been cutting aid to the district for years, and a state monitor overturned the Board of Education’s unanimous rejection of this year’s proposed spending plan. Officials said they were forced to seek a one-time revenue boost to supplement the financial loss it experienced.
Originally, district administrators had proposed closing the K-12 district’s other middle school, the Carl W. Goetz Middle School, while converting Jackson Memorial High School into a school for grades 7 and 8 and sending grades 5 and 6 to the 32-year-old McAuliffe school.
Instead, the board swapped out the Goetz school for McAuliffe, a property noted by Board of Education members as having a higher value. The district says it plans to either sell or rent out the McAuliffe school building to help solve its budget issues.
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