Checks for charity close era of daring education in Beaufort

A remarkable era of Beaufort County education came to an end Monday.

Or did it?

The board of the Eleanor Christensen Montessori and Grade School distributed the last assets of the school that closed in 2013 to 10 charities that help children.

“Of course, we are sad that we could not perpetuate the program that became ‘E.C. Montessori,’ especially in the groundbreaking area of toddler education,” founder and board member Anne Christensen Pollitzer of St. Helena Island said of the school’s 40-year run during the check-presentation ceremony at the Saltus River Grill.

“The enormous growth in day care facilities, early learning programs, and Montessori education in the public schools overwhelmed ECS.

“We are proud to have been a part of the growth of Montessori education in Beaufort County and of its principles of tolerance, kindness, cooperation, and individual growth academically, socially, and physically.”

The school named for her mother — a Beaufort elementary school librarian whose life was cut short by breast cancer at age 51 — started with a shocking ad in The Beaufort Gazette.

In 1973, when white-flight academies were the rage in South Carolina, the small ad sought parents interested in starting an integrated school with open classrooms.

Twelve mothers showed up for that meeting at The Arsenal.

“I thought we were going to be wildly popular,” Pollitzer told me. “We were wildly controversial.”

The school had a home after her husband, Rick Pollitzer, bought his mother’s — Madeleine Pollitzer’s — dance school building at the corner of Duke and West streets.

“After scrubbing, painting, clearing brush and raising a bit of local money, we opened in 1973 with 22 students,” Anne Pollitzer said. “We bought Sears carpet and Scott Foresman reading materials with $500 from the Dowling Foundation.”

Five years later, it added a Montessori program, a first for northern Beaufort County and among the first in the state.

But the school’s roots run much deeper, brushing up against defining moments in American history.

It goes back to the days of Anne Pollitzer’s great-grandmother, Abbie Holmes Christensen, who started a private boarding school in Burton in 1901 to educate African-American children.

It was a daring and all-consuming thing to do for a 4-foot-11 dynamo, who had arrived in Beaufort as a child of abolitionist New England parents who came to teach newly freed slaves.

The Port Royal Agricultural and Industrial School — popularly called the “Shanklin School” after its longtime leader — helped fill a great void in society and in education until closing in 1957.

The board used proceeds from its land sales to offer college scholarships to local African-American students. And after that ran its course, its helped finance the “EC School.”

And on Monday, its assets were distributed to today’s nonprofits, such as the First Books program that sends volunteers to read to 4-year-olds at schools and then gives them the book. By the end of the year, hundreds of students have nine books at home.

Maybe in that way, the book was actually closed on this remarkable — sometimes shocking — era of Beaufort County education.

This story was originally published June 28, 2016 at 3:34 PM with the headline "Checks for charity close era of daring education in Beaufort."