A 120-year-old Warrensburg schoolhouse is still separate and not equal

The signs help.

On the western edge of Warrensburg, Missouri, past Sunset Hill Cemetery and south of West North Street, new-looking markers point out the easy turns that lead to the Howard School.

Spotting the weather-beaten landmark isn't hard once you're on West Culton Street. Perched atop a slim tract of patchy grass that slopes into a wide gravel lot, the old building must be the place. Nothing else in sight is boarded up and covered on its southern face by flapping blue tarp. No other structure on this quiet residential strip remembers Reconstruction.

But the signs help. They demonstrate that Warrensburg at last knows the value of the second-oldest surviving black school in Missouri.

Still, even though the Howard School has immeasurable worth, the cost of making it postcard-ready — shoring up the sandstone foundation, preserving the rotted walls, leveling the buckled floor, adding a roof — will be many, many times what its backers have ever been able to bank.

Next door to the Howard School, inside the Jesus Saves Pentecostal Church where he preaches, Morris Collins sits at a table and considers the challenge ahead. His church bought the vacant Howard School in 1969 and held services there until the mid-1980s. He never attended Howard, but he is president and chairman of the Howard School Preservation Association. In front of him now are poster-board mock-ups of future museum exhibits: photocopies of aging Howard class pictures and graduation portraits. The material is fascinating, despite the low-budget presentation.

"We want to have listening stations, video, a place for people to tell their stories and for people to hear them," he says. "We've captured some of that but not nearly enough of it, where they actually tell their own stories."

At first, he says, others weren't so eager to examine the Howard School's story.

"In the past, it was as though people wanted to close the door on that history. Like segregation, the attitude was, let's forget it happened. We had to convince the public that it was a viable thing to do. And we've come a long way."

Getting onto the National Register of Historic Places took almost a decade — time spent generating excitement about the idea, then researching the history, then enlisting help with the application. Coaxing grant money now is harder than ever. And preventing the Howard School from falling further into decay becomes a more expensive prospect with every cold snap, rainstorm and heat wave.

If you stand outside long enough in this part of town — the west side, the section settled by African-Americans — you will see someone wave at Morris Collins.

Morris will wave back. Recognition, warmth, understanding — these things pass between the 62-year-old pastor, school-board president and retired art teacher and the people who know him.

Some of these people, the ones who honk their horns and slap the outside of their car doors when they roll by and see him on the street, will go to the annual Howard School fundraising barbecue in July. They will remember last summer's barbecue and last fall's fundraising banquet. He will thank them — again. And because every Lincoln penny pledged to the salvation of the Howard School counts, he will remind them to remind someone else to find the school's nondescript Web site and donate — a dollar, he'll say, even just a dollar.

So far, the group's largest single donation has been a 2003 check from the Warrensburg Rotary Club for $15,000, and the nonprofit's bank account hasn't held more than $20,000 at any one time. "When we get money," Collins says, "we spend it."

Volunteers spent the summer of 2005 taking apart an unsound 1948 addition to the school before a contractor, for safety reasons, finished the job over the next three years. Hauling away rotted wood and broken concrete and paying the contractor cost almost $10,000. That, Collins says, was Phase 1. Now that only the original 1888 building remains, the search is on for contractors to replace the roof and then work on the foundation and the floor. There will be estimates, permits, expenses.

Remember how Barack Obama raised money, Collins will tell supporters. There are 6 billion people in the world. If just a million of them gave just a dollar... .

The Howard School Preservation Association has about $8,000 right now. That's more than Warrensburg will budget in 2009 for its own citywide preservation efforts.

"We now have a preservation group, but they don't have a pot of money to dole out to private entities," says Barbara Carroll, Warrensburg's director of community development. Since the Warrensburg Historic Preservation Commission's revival in 2005 (an effort in the 1990s sputtered out before it could get going), the budget has been small — less than $10,000 a year — and has been devoted to studies and internal organization rather than awards or grants.

"When the Howard School started getting legs, five or six years ago, the city didn't have a historic preservation body," she says. "The city sent me as a representative to the Howard meetings, and we reviewed its grant applications. Whether we would offer money to it in the future if asked, I don't know."