There are still classrooms in use at the former Miller Park School on Dorsey Street.

Though now home to the Salvation Army and pre-kindergarten classes, Miller Park continues to be a staple in the city, as it has been since it was built more than 60 years ago.

For a time in 1948, when Miller Park School was being constructed, the faculty and students were housed at Main Street School due to "trouble in the furnace room," an article in the 1948 Miller Park scrapbook states.

When it finally opened its doors on April 18, 1949, students walked into a school with all sorts of new features.

The classrooms had individual seats, green "blackboards" for "eye ease and prevention of glare," windows on both sides of the room and high windows for ventilation.

The combination gym, auditorium and cafeteria had basketball courts and nets, "motion picture facilities" and a stage.

Miller Park also had a library, which was unusual for grammar schools, former Gainesville City Schools Superintendent C.J. Cheves said in a 1949 news story.

"Most schools have libraries in the classrooms. Here will be books of general interest to all the students," he said.

MaryAnn Burson, former media specialist at Miller Park, worked in that library from 1972 until the school closed in 1979.

"Miller Park was a wonderful neighborhood school. Families did not have a lot of money, but their spirit and love for the school was wonderful," she said in an email to The Times.

"For our bicentennial celebration, Bertha the Bicentennial Bookworm lined the hallways in red, white and blue segments for each book or story read by our students. We celebrated Children's Book Week with artwork by students and dressing up in homemade costumes representing book characters."

The school was located on the south side of town, where most of the families were not affluent.

"Everyone was poor, and we didn't know it," former student Larry Dyer said. "Most of the high poverty level in the city was located in the Miller Park school district. Big, tough kids came out of Miller Park."

During the school year, the Miller Park Blue Devils football team was in full swing. Summers were spent playing ball on the field.

"My favorite teacher was Sandra (Romberg). Every little boy at Miller Park had a crush on her," Dyer said. "She was one of the best teachers I've ever had."

Sandra Romberg went straight from college in 1958 to teaching at Miller Park School, where she remained for 12 years.

"Those were some of the best years of my teaching," Romberg said. "The parents were very interested, they were good families, good students."

Every morning, Romberg started class with a devotional, and students said a blessing before entering the cafeteria. She had a manger scene and a Christmas tree every year for the holidays.

Teachers had less paperwork and didn't have to be back at school for two weeks of pre-planning. They showed up on the first day just as their kids, Romberg said.

The students might not have been as privileged as those in other city schools, but they were always appreciative of their teachers, she said.

"It was a good, substantial group of children from families of policemen, firefighters. It was a good community of people that I enjoyed working with," Romberg said. "I went to some of their homes. They asked me to eat meals with them."

Even then, Gainesville's education system was a tight community. One of former student Gerald Caston's teachers later taught his daughter at Fair Street School.

Caston went to Miller Park from 1951 to 1953 when he was in fifth and sixth grade.

"I remember they took us to Lula to go skating on a field trip. We had never seen shoe skates before," Caston said in an email to The Times. "We skated in a rink that was a converted chicken house."

Dee Snow taught at Miller Park for a number of years as well. She said the students were "as hardy about schoolwork as they were about recess."

"Our principal at that time wanted us to go to the beauty parlor because he wanted his teachers to look beautiful," Romberg said.

Dyer said since he attended Miller Park, he's seen education come full circle. It went from the community schools to consolidating schools for different grades during integration, and now it's moving back to students being zoned for a school near their neighborhood.

He said he could see how closing Miller Park in 1979 was "a necessary thing."

"Those were pretty difficult times and I don't think they made a mistake. They did what they needed to do," Dyer said.

Romberg said the school closing probably had a lot to do with the economy at the time, changing lifestyles and people moving to different areas around town.

"I often think about being there. Most of the people I worked with, I loved to death," Romberg said. "I do run into people and they remember me. I have a dear friend now that I taught when I first started teaching. She works in a store here in town and I buy my clothes from her.

"... I had one the other day, I went to the doctor's office and this girl took my blood. She said, ‘I know you, you taught me how to read.' They were mighty sweet children. I think about them and love them all."