Central High School (Macon, Georgia)

Early history

Before the Civil War, the Bibb County Academy was operated as a public school; a county poor student fund paid the tuition for students unable to pay. In 1870, when Georgia established a true public school system, the Bibb County Board of Education and Orphanage was established to operate a school system for the county. The new board created grammar schools in each ward of the city and The Central High School. The name was changed to Gresham High in the late 1880s, and the school remained open until 1913. The building later served as Gresham Grammar School.

Lanier and Miller

In 1913, the county opened Lanier High School on Forsyth Street, named for poet and Macon native Sidney Lanier. The school split in 1924 into separate schools for boys and girls, with the boys moving to a campus on Holt Avenue, and the girls remaining on Forsyth Street. In 1949, Lanier added a junior high school on Hendley Street.

In 1932, Bibb County opened A.L. Miller Senior High School for Girls, named for Alexander Lawton Miller, on Montpelier Avenue, blocks from Lanier's Holt campus. The original Forsyth Street campus continued to house a junior high school for girls until February 1950, when Miller Junior High School opened next door to Miller Senior High School.

The Lanier Poets won numerous state athletic titles, and became a basketball powerhouse. The school's JROTC program received national honors.

1958 marked a major change for public education in Bibb County, as Willingham and McEvoy High Schools opened for boys and girls, respectively, meaning that for the first time, white students in Bibb County were divided by attendance zones.

Fire and integration

In April 1967, fire destroyed most of the Lanier Senior campus on Holt Avenue. Over the next several years, the school was rebuilt while the senior and middle high schools shared the Hendley Street campus. The new building, opened in December 1968, sat on the former site of Lanier Senior, though it faced Napier Avenue, with side entrances from Holt. Some buildings not destroyed by the fire were incorporated into the new school, including the Vocational Building, JROTC Complex, and "Old Gym" portions of Central High School. The last of those buildings was demolished in 2009 to make way for new Central High School buildings.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Bibb County's schools faced court-ordered integration. The four schools named Lanier and Miller merged to create the Central High School Complex. This fit with Bibb County's new pattern of creating high school-middle school complexes with directional names. Other school complexes created by the mergers included Northeast and Southwest, the latter of which later spun off a new school named Southeast.

In the case of Central, the recently built Lanier Senior building on Napier became known as "Lanier B", while the junior high on Hendley was renamed "Lanier A;" the two shared duty as Central High School. The former Miller Junior High School for Girls became Miller A Jr. High, with the old Miller Senior becoming Miller B Jr. High. They were twin junior high schools, both of them housing both 8th and 9th graders, and serving as the feeder schools to Central, which then housed grades ten, eleven, and twelve. In the 1984-85 school year, the ninth grade was moved to the senior high school, and the two junior high schools became Miller Middle School, with the seventh grade (moved up from the elementary schools) housed in one building and the eighth grade housed in the other.

For the early years of Central, about 1970 to 1975, students remained mostly segregated by sex, with the girls at Lanier A and the boys at Lanier B, with each complex retaining the principals of the girls' and boys' schools. Eventually, girls were allowed to take some courses on the boys' campus (such as physics or German, courses not taught on the girls' campus). Finally, girls and boys were completely integrated in the courses, although their supervisions (homerooms) remained sex-segregated until 1981. By the 1980s, these vestiges of sex-segregation were completely eliminated. Lanier A ultimately housed mostly ninth-grade supervisions, while the upperclassmen were primarily in Lanier B; this arrangement persisted until Lanier A was torn down in 1997.

Following the mergers in 1970, many expressed anger at the outcome; school names, the end of racial/sex segregation, colors, and mascots that had existed for decades were lost and replaced with new, directional names. Lanier ceased to exist.

One development of Bibb County's reorganization of the school district was that the county gained many new private schools. Not all survive, but to this day, Macon has a far larger private school population than similar-sized cities in Georgia (such as Augusta, Columbus, or Savannah).

Central High School

Central High emerged in 1970 as a new school straddling both sides of Hendley Street. Its sports teams were called the Chargers, and it adopted the colors orange (which, along with green, had been Lanier's) and white (blue was added by Coach Simonton in the early 1980s). Both Miller and Central were larger than many middle and high schools at the time (though the Southwest complex was much larger), and faced numerous hardships due to this fact.

1990s and beyond

In 1992, Central began offering courses in preparation for the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme (IB) curriculum; the first exams were given in May 1996. The school began the program as a county-wide magnet program under the guidance of principal Leontine Espy and IB coordinator Elizabeth Hinesley. While the IB program at Central started small, it has grown over the years, and now generally admits 40-60 students as freshmen. Typically, 50-75% of those students remain in the program and sit for examinations at the end of senior year. About half earn the IB diploma while the remainder receive certificates of performance. Both groups often exempt significant college coursework.

Central underwent a major change in 1997 when Westside High and H.G. Weaver Middle opened on Heath Road in the western portion of the county. Many of the higher-income areas that had been in the Miller/Central zone were moved to the new schools, along with parts of the Southwest zone. Westside immediately became the county's largest high school, and the corresponding decrease in enrollment that had been planned for Central meant that the Lanier A building (dating from 1948) would be demolished and replaced with a new Miller Middle School, closer to Central. The new school opened in the fall of 1997.

Despite the loss of so many students to Westside, the existence of the IB, Fine Arts, and JROTC magnet programs continued to draw many students to Central. At the same time, Miller Middle added a core knowledge/cultural literacy magnet program, and created a feeder for Central's magnet programs. Just as they had fifty years before, students from anywhere in Bibb County could attend Miller and Central.

The present and future

Central continues to draw students from across Bibb County. Enrollment numbers have challenged the limits of the former Lanier B building, which shows signs of its age — it has scarcely been renovated since the late 1960s, and some additional outbuildings date from the original 1920s facility. A new Central, possibly including a controversial merger with Southwest, was proposed in a 1998 bond issue and a resulting 1999 SPLOST (special purpose local sales tax), but was never built due to other priorities. An ELOST (educational local option sales tax) passed in September 2005 and had both a new Central and Southwest listed as priorities, as well as a new high school in north Bibb County attached to the newly opened Howard Middle School that is also expected to draw many top students.

On October 30, 2007, a ceremonial groundbreaking was held for the new Central High building, to be constructed on a cleared property across Blackmon Avenue (now closed) from the current location. The new school opened in August 2009 with capacity for 1,000 students. The old building was razed and is now a park.

Traditions and accomplishments

Notable alumni

Note: This section also includes noteworthy alumni from Lanier and Miller High Schools, which combined in 1970 to form the present Central High School. See the History sections above for more information.