Elsie Middleton looks through some books on Wednesday, March 23, 2016, to fill the shelves in a public library inside the old Lecompton High School building. The opening of a library was a priority in the effort to reclaim the vacant building for community use.

Bill Smith recalls escaping Lecompton High School in the early 1950s through a second-floor study hall window for the temptations offered elsewhere in the northwest Douglas County town.

“It was spring, and I was bored,” Smith said. “I thought, ‘I could crawl out this window and go downtown.’ I did it several times. I never got caught.”

Fast forward 60-plus years, and the retired industrial electrician volunteers to spend time in the closed school. A 1953 graduate of Lecompton High School, Smith is the go-to guy to operate the sound system in the third-floor theater and acts as the all-around building maintenance man, fixing what he can and contacting the right expert when it’s beyond his scope.

Historic Lecompton High School, 640 E. Woodson Ave. in Lecompton.

In that Smith is not alone, said Cyndi Treaster, president of Lecompton Community Pride. Forty-two years after the building stopped functioning as Lecompton High School with the consolidation that created the Perry-Lecompton High School, the building is again a center of community life through the efforts of scores of Lecompton Community Pride volunteers, she said.

Last weekend, the group had its biggest annual fundraiser, a two-day rummage sale that took in $5,000. Smith, Treaster and about 10 other volunteers were busy Wednesday boxing up the unsold items from the sale that cluttered all three floors of the school for donation to The Salvation Army.

For many of the volunteers, it’s a labor of respect for parents and grandparents whose taxes during tough economic times paid off the debt incurred to build the school, which opened in 1928, said Lecompton City Councilwoman Elsie Middleton. They built a handsome school, too, with an ocher-colored brick exterior topped with a now-gone red tile roof and finished inside with hallway floors and stairs of the same marble as Kansas University’s Strong Hall, she said.

Elsie Middleton looks through some books on Wednesday, March 23, 2016, to fill the shelves in a public library inside the old Lecompton High School building. The opening of a library was a priority in the effort to reclaim the vacant building for community use.

Smith’s parents were among the taxpayers who paid for the school, he said, tracing his deep roots in the community to the Lane University and Territorial Capital Museum standing in the same block as the school.

“My grandmother went to college in the building next door, and my aunt was a teacher there,” he said.

He may have ducked out of the school on spring days, but he also played basketball in its now divided first-floor gym and was in plays in its third-floor theater, Smith said. Those memories haunted him when the building sat vacant.

“That’s part of my drive to keep it alive now,” Smith said. “It’s a shame to see a building like this going unused. It’s a good old building.”

The school was first unoccupied following school consolidation in 1970. After about a decade, it became the home of the Northeast Kansas Educational Service Unit, and after that agency left, the John Dewey Learning Academy alternative high school.

With the departure of the alternative high school in 2012, ownership of the school reverted to the city of Lecompton.

“The City Council was interested in selling it, but nobody stepped up except a young couple with only $1,500,” Treaster said.

Town residents interested in opening the school for community use organized themselves as Lecompton Community Pride through Douglas County K-State Extension and approached a skeptical City Council about an arrangement to reopen the building. Fourteen months after the John Dewey group left, Community Pride started working to reclaim the building under an agreement with the city.

Treaster said the city paid the building’s insurance, mowed the lawn and contributed to maintenance cost, but Lecompton Community Pride was responsible for day-to-day operational expenses associated with the many functions now offered, Treaster said.

“We pay all the utilities,” she said. “It takes about $20,000 a year to keep everything going.”

Lecompton Community Pride also knew gaining the keys to the building would be followed by a lot of work to make it functional. Middleton said the John Dewey group made a lot of alterations to the building during its occupancy. Some, such as the installation of an elevator, were welcomed, but others created headaches. Walls, since removed, had been put up everywhere to divide big and small rooms into smaller ones. Carpets needed replaced or removed, wood floors refinished, walls painted and windows replaced.

Helping with the costs were grants from the Douglas County Community Foundation and the state Community Pride organization, Treaster said, but the work was done through the sweat equity of the volunteers.

As work started, two areas were given priority, Treaster said. One was reclaiming a portion of the divided gym as a community meeting room, and the second was clearing space on the first floor for a town library that Carol Howard manages.

The library now is open 20 hours a week thanks to volunteers, Howard said. It has a summer children’s reading program but is also popular with adults checking out movies, using two desktop computers or connecting their own devices to available Wi-Fi, she said.

The meeting room with its adjacent kitchen has become much in demand, and is home to the annual Lecompton High School reunions.

Those rooms might have been the priorities, but the biggest financial commitment was made in rehabilitating the school’s old theater, Treaster said.

“The first big thing was buying new curtains for the plastic ones we found in here,” she said of the dark red curtains now covering the windows that line the theater’s exterior wall. “That took a lot of money. We pulled up the dirty old carpet and refinished the floors. We easily spent $20,000 in here.”

The old study hall and library that Brown sneaked out of years ago has been reclaimed for a studio for youth dance and tumbling and adult yoga and fitness classes. The dance classes are popular with Lecompton girls and draw students from north of the Kansas River who do not want to travel all the way to Lawrence for classes or prefer the more relaxed atmosphere of the local instruction, Treaster said.

Other activity rooms include a large space for a local sewing circle, a Lecompton United Methodist Church free clothes shop and lounge where residents meet for weekly morning teas.

As the list of activities offered in the school indicate, the building is once again woven into the daily life of the community and a place where younger generations of Lecompton residents will make their own memories, Treaster said.

“Ultimately, I think that is what this building is all about is facilitating the connectedness of community,” she said. “We think that is very important.”