Established in 1922, Rosemont Elementary has been a steady force of education for thousands of Oak Cliff children during the past 100 years. In May, the Rosemont PTA celebrated the school’s centennial anniversary.
Amy Tawil, a kindergarten teacher at Rosemont, was one of many volunteers who helped collect information, anecdotes and photos from Rosemont’s history for the celebration.
Tawil describes Rosemont as a “very traditional school” that has held steady throughout its history, even as the neighborhood surrounding it became more populated and the demographics of Oak Cliff have changed.
“Through all that, I’ll tell you, the reason Rosemont is what it is today is the parent and community involvement,” Tawil says. “It’s bigger than just at the school, it’s a community out in the neighborhood.”
In 2011, Rosemont revived the school’s Dad’s Club. The club has become infamous around Oak Cliff, developing the annual Dash for the Beads event and hosting community get-togethers. But Tawil says she recently learned the school actually had a Dad’s Club as early as the 1940s.
Beth Whitaker, who attended Rosemont from 1965 until 1972, says she “so cherishes” her memories from her time as a student, especially those of the annual father/daughter dance.
“[My dad] always bought me a corsage, you know the whole thing. It was so cute. I have pictures of me year after year and the different dresses that I wore alongside him,” Whitaker says.
Whitaker says her memories from her time as a Rosemont student are not too different from those a student today would likely have.
Her first field trip was to a symphony to see Peter and the Wolf. After school, students would often visit a nearby shop called More Store to buy penny candy.
Whitaker says she also remembers partaking in shelter-in-place drills as concerns about the Cold War mounted throughout her time as a student.
Shortly after Whitaker left Rosemont, the school underwent major renovations.
Rosemont was designed by the same architect and built by the same construction company as Booker T. Washington High School, Tawil says, and originally the schools shared a similar red brick, classic facade.
But in the ’70s, the Oak Cliff community became “really involved in energy conservation,” Tawil says, and decided to stucco the school and remove many of the windows. Around that time, the school also transitioned into an open classroom model, “which is horrible,” Tawil says.
In the open classroom model, classroom walls were knocked down and the school shared large communal spaces. Tawil says that because all of the classrooms overlapped, it was likely very loud and difficult to ensure focus.
The school reinstalled classroom walls in the early ’80s, Tawil says, but the stucco remained.
“We’ve always kind of been sorry that it doesn’t look like it did back then,” Whitaker says.
Tawil has been in charge of collecting Rosemont artifacts in the months leading up to the centennial celebration. She says finding relatives of the inaugural students has been like finding treasure.
Melinda Watts attended Rosemont as a seventh grader in 1963, but her mother was a student when the school first opened. She graduated in 1927, and Watts says when she was cleaning out her mother’s house shortly after her death, she found an old Rosemont yearbook in the attic.
In the yearbook, classmates affectionately referred to Watts’ mother as “baby face” in their notes to her. Photos in the book showed her mother alongside classmates in flapper dresses, leaning against a playground slide.
Watts donated the book to the Rosemont PTA to display during the centennial.
“This has been a fun thing for us to kind of rally around, and it’s made me pull out old pictures. I still live in the Rosemont district, I am still very connected to it,” Whitaker says.
