Pompano’s First Schools

In January, 1836, the Florida Legislature created a new county that covered the southeastern portion of the peninsula, from the upper Keys north to the mouth of the St. Lucie River. Named in honor of Major Francis Dade, a U.S. Army commander who had recently been killed along with most of his command in an ambush by Seminole Indians, Dade County had but a handful of residents.

It was not until 1885 that a county school board was established and began meeting. In the fall of that year, Dade County’s first public school was opened in what is today the town of Palm Beach. A year or two later, a second school was opened in present-day Miami. As the population of southeastern Florida began to grow, new schools were built, and within a decade, the School Board was operating as many as 15 schools throughout the county, including at least one in Miami for black students.

The completion of the Florida East Coast Railway extension to Miami in 1896, led to the creation of new settlements along the tracks, including one named Pompano. By 1899, there were enough children living in the Pompano area that the Dade County School Board authorized a school for the community. As was the procedure then, the school board provided plans for a one-room schoolhouse and the lumber needed; local men provided the labor to build the structure.

On October 2, 1899 Pompano’s first public school opened its door to nine students. As many of the early settlers lived near what is today known as Lake Santa Barbara, the schoolhouse was located in that area, around the present-day intersection of S.E. Fifth Street and 25th Avenue. Mary Butler was hired as the town's first teacher, and was paid $40 per month. That same year, a similarly small school was opened in Fort Lauderdale, with 19-year-old Ivy Cromartie serving as its first teacher. These were the first two schools in what is today Broward County.

By 1901, there were 28 students attending the Pompano school. As with other local schools in agricultural areas, school terms were abbreviated. The original Pompano farmers did not have access to many agricultural laborers beyond family members and everyone in the family was expected to work during critical times in the growing season. An article in the April 14, 1905, Miami Metropolis newspaper explained the situation:

Within the next two weeks practically all of the rural or county schools of Dade County will have closed for the term.

The school at Pompano was closed last week as most of the children were being taken from the school and put to work in the tomato fields.

In nearly all of the schools that will close this month the attendance has been up to the standard and above, though it is stated that it should and would have been larger but for the fact that many parents prefer to profit by the labor of their children than send them to school.

For many of Pompano’s residents, the first hurricane they experienced was a minimal storm that hit south of the Jupiter Inlet on October 11, 1903. Even though the winds were barely hurricane strength a number of buildings in Pompano were damaged, including the town’s schoolhouse.

Classes were resumed in a nearby building and in 1905 a new and somewhat larger school was opened on what is today the 800 block of East Atlantic Boulevard. The relocation of the school was a reflection of a shift in the community’s center of population eastward to around the railroad tracks. Around 1910, the school building was moved to the 100 block of NE First Street.

In 1909 Palm Beach County was created, with Pompano being its southernmost town. With the local population increasing, the Palm Beach County School Board authorized a second teacher for the Pompano school. Plans were being made to replace the wooden structure with what one resident described as a “fine stone building.” To that end, four acres of land located north of N.E. Fourth Street were donated for the new school.

Before Pompano got its bigger school, it was moved into yet another county. In 1915, Broward County was carved out of portions of Palm Beach and Dade counties. Initially Pompano was not represented on the Broward County Board of Public Instruction, but in 1919 Pompano pioneer Joseph P. Smoak was elected to that body and served on it for the next decade.

One of the early actions of the Broward County Board of Public Instruction was to authorize a new grammar school for Pompano. A two-story masonry building was constructed on the land donated for that purpose (today the site of Pompano Beach Middle School), and the old wooden school was sold and moved once again. After being used a private residence for a while, the building was sold to the Methodist Church, which used it for Sunday school classes before it was finally demolished in the 1960s.

Perhaps nothing did more to boost Pompano's civic pride than the opening of the town's first high school in 1928. Prior to this, Pompano's white high school students took instruction at and graduated from Fort Lauderdale Central High School, which had been Broward County's only high school from the time it was built in 1915.

Although they could now avoid the long daily ride to Fort Lauderdale, some Pompano students who had been attending Fort Lauderdale's Central High School were a little disappointed that they would be moving from a school with 2,000 students and a full range of programs and activities, to a school that had an enrollment that was counted in the dozens.

A new school building was constructed adjacent to the existing grammar school that had been built a decade earlier, and when completed, the grammar school students moved into the new, larger building and the high school took over the older structure. The first graduating class at Pompano High School had just eight students.

As Pompano entered the 1930s, it had a kindergarten through 12th-grade educational campus that would serve it through the 1960s. There were still, however, a significant number of area residents who did not have access to local public schools. Rigid segregation laws prevented Pompano’s black residents, who constituted almost half the local population, from attending the Pompano schools; they would have to wait until the coming decades for significant educational support from the public school system.

Courtesy of the Pompano Beach Historical Society. All rights reserved.