As the Board of Education grapples with declining school enrollments and pressures to cut costs, perhaps by closing a school, Hawley School has been placed at the center of the discussion by recommendations that suggest that the Church Hill Road school may be the facility best suited for closure. Among the arguments being amassed to fight its closing is the historic nature of this school. It is interesting to note at this point that the school’s long history began in the middle of another polarizing conflict among the town’s residents.

This conflict broke out in 1919 amid the furor created when the high school principal fired an unusually popular teacher. The details of the controversy are not important, but the result was. A group of students who supported the dismissed teacher, with the backing of their parents, withdrew from the old high school and formed their own Community School. This new school was held in the old Sunset Tavern on the corner of Currituck Road and Academy Lane and was supervised by Miss Clair Spring, one of the teachers who had resigned to protest her colleague’s dismissal. The Community School opened in November 1919 with an enrollment of 44 and it graduated its first senior class of three female students the next spring. The school was considered successful as it opened again in the fall of 1920 with 50 students in attendance.

Meanwhile, the entire Board of Education had resigned, and the remaining students and faculty continued to conduct school under the supervision of the principal who had sparked the original controversy. They met in the old building until it was destroyed by arson in June 1920. This catastrophe left those students to fend for themselves by taking the daily train to Danbury to attend classes at the high school there while others traveled to New Milford and Bridgeport. Amid this educational chaos, Hawley School was born.

Mary Hawley’s mother had just died, leaving her the family’s considerable fortune. Arthur Treat Nettleton, the treasurer of the Newtown Savings Bank and personal friend of Miss Hawley, approached her about the possibility of healing the rift in the town’s secondary school community by building a new school with part of her substantial fortune. She agreed, and by early fall 1921 she presented plans for a state-of-the-art school. The town was initially reluctant to accept her offer because many felt that such a school would saddle the town with extraordinary maintenance expenses. Sensitive to this reservation, she submitted plans for a somewhat scaled back and cheaper school with a trust fund that would supply income for its maintenance. This offer was accepted and in the fall of 1922, the building named for Mary Hawley’s parents, Sarah and Marcus Hawley, opened its doors to a reunited student body.

Hawley School is now just another in the inventory of the town’s schools. In its day, it was a model of what an excellent school building should be. Newtown had many visitors from other towns who came to see what could be done with the physical plants in their own school districts to foster better education. Hawley is no longer on the cutting-edge of educational facilities, but it is a substantial, well-built structure that has evolved through two additions to become eminently suited to the modern educational needs of the town.

More importantly, Hawley is a monument to the town’s ability to overcome a damaging educational controversy, uniting its citizens in a sense of being part of a special town, just as it has recently demonstrated this ability as it overcomes the recent horror perpetrated at Sandy Hook. Most importantly, it is a tribute to a woman and the parents that gave her the financial resources to heal the town’s wounds, and then continue to bestow substantial gifts to the town’s benefit.

Hawley School stands as a tribute to Mary Hawley’s love of the town that had not always treated her kindly. Ideally it should remain as a school which visibly celebrates the importance of education in Newtown and Mary Hawley’s educational vision. By no means should the citizens of Newtown allow the building to be closed and demolished. At the very least it should be repurposed for other town agencies, and kept in good condition pending a future rise in the student population, which our consultants tell us is inevitable.