Minden Seventh-day Adventist School

THE SCHOOL BEGINS

In December 1976 plans for the Minden church school were born and the bank account was started with a $10.00 check from Willie Brewer. Over the next two years their little church of only thirty members gave over $27,000 for the church school building and operating expenses including the teacher’s salary. The school opened for the 1977-1978 school year. The second year of operation, attendance increased over fifty per cent from eight students the first year to thirteen students the second year (Record, 1979). The school closed for a time and reopened for the 1994-1995 school year (Minutes, 1994). Located near the western edge of Minden on Magnolia Street, the one-room school was located in a separate facility behind the church (Hevener, 1998).

Minden SDA School
Imogene Pendley instructing a student at the Minden church school in 1984. Above photos courtesy of Don Hevener.
Evalyn Young in her classroom in 1998. Photo courtesy of the Southwestern Union Record.

A New School in 2004

Groundbreaking for the new facility. L to R: Terry McCormick, conference trust director; Bill Robertson, mayor; Theron Winzer, city council representative; Heath Clark, Minden Adventist School student; C. B. Shepherd, head elder and building committee chair; Pastor Brian Danese; and charter members Ann Black and Muriel Elkins (Schwisow, 2004).

The school was over twenty-five years old. On March 17, 2004, a group of thirty-five supporters of the Minden church school met to break ground for a new facility that would be in use for the next school year. They planned to build a much larger classroom and and outside play area. It would also include a multipurpose room that would double as a church sanctuary for the Minden church. The school served as a missionary outreach of the church, with sixty per cent of the students coming from non-Adventist families (Schwisow, 2004).

Citations

(1979, Apr. 19). Southwestern Union Record, p. 7.

(1994, Apr. 5). K-12 Board of Education Minutes. Shreveport, LA: Arkansas-Louisiana Conference of SDA.

Hevener, Don. (1998, Dec. 1). Southwestern Union Record, p. 14.

Schwisow, Ed. (2004, Jul. 1). Ibid., p. 12.

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