Man Returns to School, But Now It’s Home

NESHANNOCK FALLS, Pa. —  In the one-room schoolhouse he attended as a boy, Frank Sokevitz learned reading, ‘riting and ‘rithmetic. Fifty years later in the very same school, Sokevitz is learning a different three R’s: renovating, remodeling and redecorating.

Sokevitz, 59, and his wife, Roanna, 57, are converting the red brick Neshannock Falls School, where Sokevitz attended first and second grades in the 1940s, into a home.

Gone is the potbellied stove that provided the only heat for the building from the time it opened, in about 1871, until it closed in 1947. Gone too are the desks where children in eight grades sat side by side learning about the world beyond the farm.

Still standing but destined for removal are two bookcases once crammed with lunch pails and the teacher’s prize possession, a full set of Modern Wonder Books: 150 pamphlets with such titles as “Policemen,” “Mining” and “How Plants Multiply.”

“They couldn’t even afford running water, so they definitely couldn’t afford a library,” Sokevitz said. “These were state of the art then.”

With the help of neighboring Amish carpenters, the Sokevitzes are working to shore up the sagging structure, patch the slate roof and one day restore the belfry and bell that summoned children to school from surrounding farms in Lawrence County, about 10 miles from the Ohio line.

Once the weather turns too cold to work outside, the couple will focus their efforts inside, dividing the 26-by-28-foot space into living room, bedroom, small kitchen, utility room and bathroom.

Blackboards will be taken down and given to an Amish school. The narrow plank floors will be carpeted. The corner spot reserved for the teacher’s desk will become the utility room. And insulation and rough-sawed hemlock will cover the plaster walls, chair rail and wainscoting.

Sokevitz’s father bought the schoolhouse and its acre of land in 1950 and gave it to his son 16 years later, when it became a warehouse for grain, lumber and family memorabilia.

Over the years, the building deteriorated through neglect and vandalism until Roanna Sokevitz suggested to her husband that they make it their home. She too had attended a one-room schoolhouse about five miles from Neshannock Falls, and she was tired of renting and apartment life.

By using less-expensive Amish labor, low-cost materials and doing much of the work themselves, the couple estimate the project will cost $30,000. They plan to move in next summer.

“That’s a far cry from $100,000,” the minimum cost of building a home, said Sokevitz, who works part-time on the grounds crew at Westminster College in nearby New Wilmington.

Economics may have prompted the renovation, but nostalgia has proved to be just as powerful an incentive.

When the school closed in 1947, Sokevitz had just completed second grade. A reunion in 1981 with former classmates brought back memories, and they have grown keener during the time spent patching and repairing the schoolhouse.

Sokevitz recalled the raised platform in front of the blackboard where students had to recite their lessons, and the bitterly cold days trying to keep warm with the lone wood stove. He remembers how the boys, playing on one side of the building, and the girls on the other side, would throw a ball back and forth over the roof.

“It was a primitive, pre-computer thing,” he said, laughing.

He spoke of an older boy who acted as his bodyguard. “All I knew was he was bigger than me and we walked to school together, and the older kids in the back of the room never bothered me.”

And he recalled his appointed job of helping to haul drinking water from a hand pump during his two-mile trek to school every morning. The pump is no longer there, but Sokevitz plans to install a new working pump outside.

As for the his-and-her outhouses, nostalgia won’t convince Roanna Sokevitz to rebuild those.

“We draw the line at that,” she said.