Talk:Rayne High School

Where did black students in Rayne and Acadia Parish go to school? FloridaArmy (talk) 19:43, 23 August 2025 (UTC)

@FloridaArmy: Black students in Rayne, which is a small city in Acadia Parish (of which the seat is Crowley, which had its segregated school), went to the school commonly called "Rayne Negro School", i.e., Acadia Parish Training School, renamed at some point to Armstrong High School. This was very easy to find for me on the internet, and I can't justify the process of original research that you had undertaken to cause yourself to believe that Rayne black students generally went to the Crowley school, as if there hadn't been a Rayne segregated school. Sources:

• https://www.africanamericanschoolbuildingrevival.com/louisiana-schools
• https://africanamericanhighschoolsinlouisianabefore1970.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/armstrong-high-2.pdf
• https://www.eunicetoday.com/obituaries/dolores-dale-yokum-batiste (address: 700 Martin Luther King Drive, Rayne)

Ping also Meters —Alalch E. 06:39, 24 August 2025 (UTC)

Thanks very much Alalch E.! I've seen those sources also. When was Armstrong High established? How were you able to determine that some students who finished at the school in Payne did not continue on at the high school in Crowley? Did the school in Payne offer the same grade levels? Thanks again. FloridaArmy (talk) 15:25, 24 August 2025 (UTC)

You're welcome. I don't have answers to any of those questions, and I did not try to determine that some students who finished at the school in Rayne did not continue on at the high school in Crowley, as I was not concerned with that question at all. What is the relevance of that question? —Alalch E. 14:29, 25 August 2025 (UTC)

What I think I know is that Acadia Parish Training School was a parish training school, which is not a type of school in terms of level. "Training" describes its function as a teaching-certificate center, where prospective teachers trained to obtain certification. After the program of founding or designating schools specifically as training schools was cancelled (there's content about it in Beauregard Parish Training School), the school was renamed Armstrong High. By then it was already functioning as a high school, so the change was a renaming, not an upgrade from a lower level (from the third source: "Mrs. Batiste was a 1958 high school graduate of Acadia Parish Training School"). —Alalch E. 14:42, 25 August 2025 (UTC)