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About two months ago, AIJC Academy began repairs of the historic Northside School in West Point after the West Point Consolidated School District donated the facilities to the school in 2024, Robinson told The Dispatch. Braden Simmons/Dispatch Staff\t\n\t\t\tEven though it\u2019s been more than 70 years since she attended Northside Elementary School, Bettye Swift can still recall the names of each teacher she had there in the mid-1950s.\nThe school opened in 1946 and served the city\u2019s Black students during racial segregation. But to Swift, Northside was just her school, a place where teachers made the best of whatever resources they had.\n\u201cAt Northside, when I was in the third grade, I had a teacher \u2026 and we had music in the classroom,\u201d Swift told The Dispatch. \u201cShe had a piano in the back, and this is when we would always do songs, even though we did not have a music department. She would take peanuts and we had a grinder, and she would make peanut butter and crackers, and give it to us. \u2026 So we learned life experience, even though we didn\u2019t have all the departmental things that people have today.\u201d\n\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\tShavonne Buford, left, assistant school administrator for Assembly in Jesus Christ Academy, and Joe Robinson, project manager for the academy\u2019s renovations at Northside School, hold up a sign Thursday placed outside the old school building in West Point. After decades of sitting vacant and in disrepair, AIJC Academy is beginning renovations at the historic landmark to reopen the facility for students in August, Buford told The Dispatch. Braden Simmons/Dispatch Staff\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\n\nIt was the devotion shown by her teachers that inspired Swift to pursue a degree in education from Mississippi State University before returning in 1971 to the West Point Consolidated School District, where she taught for more than 36 years.\nNorthside School carries a similar significance for dozens of Black students in West Point who, like Swift, shuffled through its doors over the decades. So when she learned earlier this month about Assembly in Jesus Christ Academy\u2019s plans to reopen the school after decades of it sitting vacant, Swift was ecstatic.\nJacqueline Hannah, a former student who attended Northside School during the late 1960s, shares Swift\u2019s excitement, remembering the school as a safe space for many young Black students, including herself, from the difficulties of racism during segregation.\n\u201cIt was just a place where kids our age (who were) Black \u2026 didn\u2019t have to worry about not fitting in or not being accepted,\u201d Hannah said. \u201c\u2026 It was just a big disappointment to me at that time, when they did (close it) because (we) were just so used to being in that environment.\u201d\n\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\n\nThe building\u2019s purpose has changed since Northside first opened on Fifth Street. In 1970, the district closed the school in line with its desegregation plan. But the decision was overturned by the Fifth Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals, and Northside reopened the following year.\nVirginia Ellis, archivist with the Bryan Public Library in West Point, said the building, which was designated as a Mississippi Landmark in 2007, has mostly sat vacant since at least the 1990s despite both the city and school district\u2019s attempts to give it new life.\n\u201cThey were trying to refurbish the building, and maybe use it for a community center or something like that, just because it\u2019s a historic building and it means so much to that community up there,\u201d Ellis said.\nWhile those ideas never came to fruition, AIJC Academy\u2019s ongoing renovations give alumni hope the school may once again open its doors to students.\nOnce a school, always a school\nAIJC Academy started in 2015 as a tutoring program designed to help area students with learning disabilities or general difficulties in school learn more effectively, School Administrator Carol Lee told The Dispatch.\nSince then, Assistant School Administrator Shavonne Buford said the program has grown to serve as many as 200 students a semester as a K-12 private Christian school based out of the Assembly in Jesus Christ Church off Highway 45 Alternate.\n\u201cOnce (those students) begin to come, we see a big change,\u201d Buford said. \u201cBecause the parents always talk about, \u2018I thought (my child) couldn\u2019t do it,\u2019 and when they bring them to AIJC Academy, it\u2019s a turnaround.\u201d\nBuford said school administrators realized the school had outgrown facilities in 2024, prompting the need for a larger space to host the school. Northside presented the perfect opportunity.\nWPCSD donated the property to the academy in 2024, and while renovations were slightly delayed by initial site cleaning and construction site requirements, construction intended to revitalize the school started about two months ago.\nAIJC is currently pursuing roughly $500,000 in renovations, including roof replacement and window installation that have already been completed.\nBased on initial inspections, Joe Robinson, the project manager for the school, believes the building will also need repairs to its electrical system, new fiber cable for internet access, a replacement of the HVAC system, new floor boards and new interior walls.\n\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\tZechariah Hale, left, supervisor with J Miller Roofing, drills part of a new window frame at Northside School in West Point on Wednesday while laborer Fredrick Jennings helps. Assembly in Jesus Christ Academy currently has $500,000 on hand to fund more than $1 million in necessary repairs at the school and plans to seek additional funding through local grants and resident donations, said Carol Lee, school administrator. Braden Simmons/Dispatch Staff\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\n\nTo fully fund all of those needs, administrators believe the academy will need at least another $500,000.\n\u201cWe\u2019re reaching out to other programs that are in the city of West Point that are giving out grant funding,\u201d Lee said. \u201cYou can\u2019t ever tell how that\u2019s going to go, but we\u2019re hoping that they will help us.\u201d\nEven with the mountain of repairs ahead of them, Lee and Buford remain hopeful enough can be completed by August to welcome the first cohort of students to the new facility. While he said that timeline is \u201cfeasible,\u201d Robinson expects efforts to fully renovate the building will continue for at least another 10 months after August.\nEventually, AIJC plans to incorporate elements of Northside\u2019s history into the academy\u2019s final design, specifically finding ways to highlight the old school\u2019s signage and its alumni.\nOnce initial repairs are done, Buford plans to host an open house for community members to showcase the project\u2019s progress and drum up additional support and donations for the renovation.\nAs the school returns to life, Hannah hopes to see it continue to serve as a reminder to younger students about the difficulties of racial segregation and the social growth the area and country have experienced since that time.\n\u201cIt\u2019s good to be able to remember your history, and to be able to tell your children about how your life was at that time,\u201d Hannah said. \u201cAnd how now all of us should be striving to do better and to live with each other and get along.\u201d\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\n \n \n Quality, in-depth journalism is essential to a healthy community. The Dispatch brings you the most complete reporting and insightful commentary in the Golden Triangle, but we need your help to continue our efforts. In the past week, our reporters have posted 42 articles to cdispatch.com. Please consider subscribing to our website for only $2.30 per week to help support local journalism and our community.\n \n \n\n\t\t\t\n \n \n Quality, in-depth journalism is essential to a healthy community. The Dispatch brings you the most complete reporting and insightful commentary in the Golden Triangle, but we need your help to continue our efforts. In the past week, our reporters have posted 42 articles to cdispatch.com. Please consider subscribing to our website for only $2.30 per week to help support local journalism and our community." ], "output": "readability", "pwd": "/data/archive/1787801044.520015", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2026-08-29T07:58:16.352333+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ], "screenshot": [], "singlefile": [], "title": [ { "cmd": [ "curl", "--silent", "--location", "--compressed", "--max-time", "120", "--user-agent", "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/118.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 ArchiveBox/0.7.4 (+https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox/) curl/curl 8.14.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)", "https://cdispatch.com/news/historic-preservation-west-points-historic-northside-school-poised-for-new-future/" ], "cmd_version": "curl 8.14.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)", "end_ts": "2026-08-29T07:58:16.344824+00:00", "index_texts": null, "output": "Historic Preservation: West Point\u2019s historic Northside School poised for new future - The Dispatch", "pwd": "/data/archive/1787801044.520015", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2026-08-29T07:58:16.318204+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ], "wget": [ { "cmd": [ "wget", "--no-verbose", "--adjust-extension", "--convert-links", "--force-directories", "--backup-converted", "--span-hosts", "--no-parent", "-e", "robots=off", "--timeout=120", "--restrict-file-names=windows", "--warc-file=/data/archive/1787801044.520015/warc/1787990282", "--page-requisites", "--user-agent=Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/118.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 ArchiveBox/0.7.4 (+https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox/) wget/GNU Wget 1.21.3", "--compression=auto", "https://cdispatch.com/news/historic-preservation-west-points-historic-northside-school-poised-for-new-future/" ], "cmd_version": "GNU Wget 1.21.3", "end_ts": "2026-08-29T07:58:16.306658+00:00", "index_texts": null, "output": "cdispatch.com/news/historic-preservation-west-points-historic-northside-school-poised-for-new-future/index.html", "pwd": "/data/archive/1787801044.520015", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2026-08-29T07:58:02.251658+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ] }, "icons": null, "is_archived": true, "is_static": false, "latest": { "archive_org": null, "dom": null, "favicon": "favicon.ico", "git": null, "media": null, "pdf": null, "screenshot": null, "singlefile": null, "title": "Historic Preservation: West Point\u2019s historic Northside School poised for new future - The Dispatch", "warc": null, "wget": "cdispatch.com/news/historic-preservation-west-points-historic-northside-school-poised-for-new-future/index.html" }, "link_dir": "/data/archive/1787801044.520015", "newest_archive_date": "2026-08-29T07:58:18.413403+00:00", "num_failures": 0, "num_outputs": 6, "oldest_archive_date": "2026-08-29T07:58:01.480830+00:00", "path": "/news/historic-preservation-west-points-historic-northside-school-poised-for-new-future/", "schema": "Link", "scheme": "https", "snapshot_id": "9e2f1ddb-a76c-4906-9156-a5b72fe6a655", "sources": [ "/data/sources/1787801044-import.txt" ], "tags": ",cdispatch_local,pool", "tags_str": "cdispatch_local,pool", "timestamp": "1787801044.520015", "title": "Historic Preservation: West Point\u2019s historic Northside School poised for new future - The Dispatch", "updated": "2026-08-29T07:58:01.480432+00:00", "updated_date": "2026-08-29 07:58", "url": "https://cdispatch.com/news/historic-preservation-west-points-historic-northside-school-poised-for-new-future/" }