Supt. Randy Weseman walks along a Centennial School hallway in this photo from March 2003 on a tour of the building. Under the facility master plan, Centennial would be closed and its students moved to another school. Because of Centennial's proximity to Lawrence High School, Weseman envisioned the elementary school being used for special LHS activities.

The fates of Centennial, East Heights and Riverside schools are sealed. They’ll close their doors Friday — the finale of a series of hotly contested decisions by a Lawrence school board strapped for cash in tight budget times.

Despite resistance from parents and neighborhood school advocates, the board on May 12 voted to close Centennial and East Heights. An earlier vote sealed Riverside’s end.

So Thursday and Friday, the final sixth-grade classes will be promoted to junior high, and teachers will clean out their classrooms.

That would be the end of the story, except people who have been touched by the schools haven’t forgotten the places where they learned to read, monkeyed around on the jungle gym and made lifelong friends.

In scrapbooks, yearbooks, saved school work and their minds, they’ve accumulated memories that immortalize their childhood stomping grounds.

The Journal-World mined their recollections and put together stories that unofficially chronicle the schools’ histories. The stories appear in a special report that begins on Page 1D of today’s paper.

Though unique tales arose from each location, the overall sentiment became familiar from one school to the next: sad to see my school close; happy to have spent a few magical years there.