Pioneer Heritage Middle School

Children in the 19th century who grew up in this area never dreamed of a school such as Pioneer Heritage Middle School. The Robertson School, founded in the 1850s, didn’t have a gymnasium, a cafeteria, a library or computers. Students walked to school through mud and ice or rode mules and horses, and they did homework by lamplight. Genevieve “Sis” Newman Kerley remembers her brothers carrying her through the cold winter wind riding on their shoulders. The Newman children lived closest to the school and never escaped the teacher’s notice, as he or she often lived at their house. When the weather turned bad, the children who lived too far away to make it home safely spent the night with the Newmans.

The old Robertson School, which once sat near where Pioneer Heritage is now located, was a one-room school with outdoor toilets. Back then young people achieved physical fitness by threshing wheat, picking cotton and hauling water from the well to do the laundry with a scrub board and tub. The lessons taught at school were the basics – reading, penmanship and arithmetic. Texas history was still being carved out of the black land prairie and some children had relatives who could still remember the Civil War without referring to textbooks. Classes such as robotics and video production weren’t even imagined, though the children who lived west of Frisco in the early 1900s had watched a railroad being built and many could operate complicated farm machinery that today would be considered too dangerous for young people.

One of the Robertson School families was the Malones, whose ancestor had been James Robertson. All five of the Malone children grew up working on the farm, getting up hours before dawn to do chores before they even set out for the school that bore their great-grandfather’s name. All five Malone children completed college. Pioneer Heritage Middle School is dedicated in honor of the spirit of community and dedication to learning shared by families such as the Newmans, Robertsons and Malones and their friends and neighbors.