Beauregard Parish Training School

About this property

The Beauregard Parish Training School (1929–1970) in DeRidder, Louisiana, was a school for black students and black teachers in training. The school's buildings are located on the original property at the corner of Martin Luther King Drive and Alexandria Street, and were the first African-American related structures in southwestern Louisiana to be listed in the National Register of Historic Places, on March 1, 1996. Teacher preparation was an important goal of the Beauregard Parish Training School from its founding until the mid-1930s when the program was discontinued. Subsequently, students were required to attend one or two years at a normal school in order to obtain a teaching certificate. The parish training school movement for training black teachers began in 1911. By school year 1919–1920 Beauregard Parish Training School became one of 107 Training schools in the South. The curriculum included regular courses such as math, science, and English, as well as instruction in how to teach. Although each student completing the teaching program was awarded a certificate stating that he or she was qualified to teach at the elementary level in black schools, it was necessary for each to pass a test given by the state Department of Education before that certification was considered valid. After the teaching program was discontinued in the mid-1930s, students were required to attend one or two years at a normal school in order to obtain a teaching certificate. The school curriculum offered and its teachers were highly valued by the black citizens of Beauregard Parish. The concept of the parish training school created in 1911 was made possible through the efforts of four philanthropic foundations interested in the education of African-American youth. These foundations: the General Education Board, the John F. Slater Fund, and Anna T. Jeanes Fund, and the Rosenwald Fund, convinced state education officials throughout the South to work with them to improve educational opportunities for blacks. The training school movement had several goals. The first was to provide each parish with a central public school for blacks. With its good physical facilities and carefully chosen curriculum, this school would serve as a model for other black schools in the area. Another goal was to provide a more thorough education by offering more courses. Thus, students could attend a training school two or three years longer than they could one of their smaller rural cousins. Early in the movement training schools offered at least eight grades; later they offered ten or eleven. A third goal was to provide industrial and manual training for African-American children,"..laying particular emphasis upon subject pertaining to home and farm." The final goal of the parish training school movement was to prepare teachers who would then serve in the region's rural black elementary schools. The first training school in the nation opened in Louisiana's Tangipahoa Parish in 1911.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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