Resident recalls
days spent learning
in one-room school
Myron Van Derveer
pays visit to town’s old
West Freehold School
PHOTOS BY JERRY WOLKOWITZ Remembering days gone by, Myron Van Derveer sits at a desk similar to one he used as a student in the one-room West Freehold School, Freehold Township.
While the town’s Historic Preservation Commission prepares to open the one-room West Freehold School to the public this fall, one of the few — if not the last — surviving students from the building recently paid a visit.
As work inside the one-room school on Wemrock Road near the corner of Route 537 was taking place on a recent morning, Freehold resident Myron Van Derveer, 93, came in for a visit.
Van Derveer said he attended the school with 37 other students in the late 1930s. He said the school had one room with one teacher who had to conduct lessons for students in eight grades each day.
Van Derveer recalled that students in each grade would go to the front of the room for a short period of time, during which the teacher would teach the lesson. When the lesson was completed those students would go to the back of the room to practice the lesson, as the students in the next grade went to the front to learn.
A 1914 photograph provided by Myron Van Derveer shows students outside the one-room West Freehold School, Wemrock Road, Freehold Township. Van Derveer, 7 years old at the time, is on the bottom row, all the way to the left.
"We seemed to have survived and got fairly successful, most of us," Van Derveer said.
The students attended school from 9 a.m. to noon, when they broke for lunch. They resumed their day at 1 p.m. and continued until 3 p.m.
The West Freehold School was warmed by a wood burning stove, for which the students would cut wood. If they had to use the bathroom, students had to go to an outhouse.
During recess, Van Derveer said, the students played tag, sat on swings, or climbed trees.
The one-room West Freehold School (above), Wemrock Road, Freehold Town-ship, is scheduled to be spruced up before being opened to the public. Susan Winter (r) of the Freehold Town-ship Historic Preservation Commission helps to get the school ready for its fall opening.
Van Derveer was the youngest of three brothers. He remembered that one teacher his brothers had would rap students across the knuckles with a ruler if they misbehaved. Because of this, he said, he waited an extra year before entering the school, until a new teacher was hired.
The new teacher’s punishments were a little more civil, Van Derveer recalled, noting that students stood in a corner or in a closet.
While Van Derveer said he can’t recall everything about his days in one of the town’s one-room schools, he does remember old-fashioned desks and inkwells.
"Sometimes the girls got their hair shoved in the inkwells," he said.
Of the 37 students with whom Van Derveer attended the West Freehold School, he said he believes he is the only remaining survivor.