Willow Hill Heritage & Renaissance Center volunteers are planning beyond this year's Labor Day weekend festival. Students from several departments at Georgia Southern University are getting involved in historic preservation, a community survey and plans to revive the old Willow Hill School as an active education site with a summer program in 2014.
    Next year will be the 140th anniversary of the Willow Hill School's founding by former slaves. The existing building, constructed in 1954, served as part of the Bulloch County school system until 1999, then was purchased in 2005 by descendants of the founding families.
    The past two years, supporters have held a Labor Day weekend festival at the site near Portal. The 2011 festival highlighted the unveiling of a historical marker and museum exhibits about the school itself. In 2012, the center added a museum exhibit about the area’s black Primitive Baptist churches.
    From the first, organizers had thoughts of making the old school an active community center. These ideas started moving closer to reality after a meeting of the Willow Hill Center's advisory board in January, said Dr. Gayle Jackson, the center's development director.
    “It’s been kind of amazing,” Jackson said. “When we came in January to try to get some things moving and making contacts, we had no idea that things were going to flow as quickly as they have.”
    By last week, when she and her husband, Willow Hill Heritage & Renaissance Center President Dr. Alvin Jackson, met with a small group of Georgia Southern faculty and students on campus, student involvement was taking shape in at least five different projects for Willow Hill. Then about 50 people attended a community meeting Saturday at Willow Hill to hear about these projects and plan for the 2013 festival, to be held Aug. 31.

Needs assessment
    To help map Willow Hill’s future uses, Dr. Moya Alfonso, an assistant professor in Georgia Southern’s College of Public Health, plans to have students in her master’s level Community Health Analysis class perform a needs assessment in the fall semester. It will include focus-group discussions, individual interviews and a town hall meeting, and will not be limited to public health needs.
    “It will be broader than that,” Alfonso said. “It will deal with education and other issues the community thinks need to be addressed by the center.”
    Ben Massey, 21, a senior majoring in biology and premedicine, is assisting Alfonso as a service learning student facilitator. Launched one year ago by the GSU Office of Student Leadership and Civic Engagement, the student facilitators program assigns student workers to help professors with community service projects.

Design and BUILD
    Students in Studio 5, a senior interior design course taught by Assistant Professor Diane Phillips, in the university’s School of Human Ecology, will look at how best to use the old Willow Hill School’s available space. They will design for new uses for museum exhibits and a summer school program. Irene Anderson, 19 and a junior biology and premed major, is student coordinator for this project.
    Speaking to Anderson, Alvin Jackson said that the planning should preserve the building’s historic character as much as possible.
    Meanwhile, incoming freshmen in the BUILD program are slated to paint, move furniture and do some cleaning on the Willow Hill campus during the latter half of July. BUILD, or Building Undergraduate Involvement in Leadership Development, will have about 120 students divided into two sessions working on projects around Bulloch County before fall semester begins, said Wendy Denton, assistant director for service learning in the Office of Student Leadership.
    Denton said the Willow Hill Center is providing service learning opportunities for students from several disciplines.
    “What has been surprising to me about this whole thing is that it has struck a chord with so many different kinds of programs on campus, from public health to education to history and interior design and student leadership,” she said.
    The Willow Hill Center’s board has proposed an enrichment and leadership program for students in grades six through eight to be held in summer 2014. Students in the university’s Southern Leaders program, led by student Jasmine Hines, are set to develop the leadership curriculum for middle school students.
    In a different project, College of Education students taking a methods course with Dr. Michelle Reidel will write a guide for teaching the history of Willow Hill to middle school children. The Georgia Southern students will visit Willow Hill, look at its museum materials and find ways to bring these alive for grades six through eight, Reidel said.

More history
    The Willow Hill Center’s leaders also intend to expand its role as a museum for Bulloch County’s historic African-American schools and communities.
    For the past 30 years, Dr. Alvin Jackson, an Ohio physician who attended the school and is descended from some of its founders, has been returning to Statesboro to record interviews with the area’s black residents and their descendants. Jaclyn Grizzell, now working toward her master’s degree and Georgia Southern’s new public history certification, has written a proposal to convert Jackson’s hundreds of tapes into digital format.
    Dr. Michael Van Wagenen, the public history program coordinator, said the project’s goal is to make the interviews available on the Internet as both audio and text.
    In another history project, organizers hope that Willow Hill will eventually share its campus with the Bennett Grove School. Located on private land a few miles away, Bennett Grove, built in 1918, is believed to be the only surviving one-room school that served African-American students in Bulloch County.
    Moving it to Willow Hill will be challenging, Gayle Jackson acknowledged.
    “It’s standing but it’s leaning,” she said. “The individuals who own that property now have agreed to give the school to us, and what we have to manage to do is to try to move the school, and we want to move it on the campus, but it is quite fragile.”
    Inger Wood, a newcomer to Statesboro who has a master’s in historic preservation, wrote a plan for a Black History Month event focusing on the Bennett Grove School to be held at Georgia Southern in February 2014.
    Her proposal recently won a $2,000 grant from the Georgia Humanities Council. The grant will pay only for the event, which will include speeches and conclude with a visit to the Bennett Grove site, Wood said. Organizers hope it will lead to support for the move and preservation.
    They are also working with William James High School alumni to spotlight that school’s history at Willow Hill. Dedication of  a William James School History Room is slated as part of this year’s Willow Hill Festival. The Aug. 31 festival will begin with a prayer breakfast, and other details will be announced closer to the event.