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Cannon School celebrates 40th anniversary
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Published: September 30, 2009
CONCORD — It was the year of astronauts landing on the moon, Woodstock and the opening of Cabarrus Academy.
That academy is now named Cannon School.
Tonight, Cannon School will continue celebrating its 40th anniversary and the year 1969, when it was founded. It will be the first of three Parent Education Program events for the school community to celebrate the anniversary.
A panel of speakers will discuss what it was like in 1969 and when Cabarrus Academy opened.
"We had no idea what it would be like when we started," said Jane Liles, one of the school's founders. "The excellence of education was our premise. I think we've reached it and gone farther than we dreamed of."
Liles and other founders, such as Buddy Hilbish, will be at the event on Wednesday, to talk about their experience as parents who wanted to start their own private school.
After gauging the interest in the community, finding funding sources and hiring a headmaster and teachers, Cabarrus Academy began in the fall of 1969, Hilbish said.
Its original location was in the J.W. Cannon home in downtown Concord.
When the school began, there were more than 100 students enrolled, Hilbish said. There are now more than 800 students, and the school has expanded at its current location on Poplar Tent Road.
As Liles and Hilbish recall Cabarrus Academy's beginnings, they said they are proud of how much the school has evolved.
"It was a difficult time for teachers, as well as parents," Hilbish said. "We had no structure, and who knew how it would turn out."
The year itself was difficult, as Shirley Phifer will recall at the event, serving one of the speakers to represent the year of Cannon School's founding.
As an African-American woman, Phifer attended Concord High, then an all-white school, after her all-black school, Logan High, was closed.
"We were not sure how we'd be received or perceived," Phifer said. "It was a whole other experience."
Locally, 1969 was the first year that desegregation was made mandatory, said Michael Eury, executive director for Historic Cabarrus Association and another speaker at the event.
"(It) was an extremely influential and unusual year," Eury said. "A lot of things happened that we'd never seen the likes of."
Eury will speak about those major events, such as the landing on the moon, Woodstock, the Vietnam War and desegregation.
To also depict what 1969 was like, Phil Wilson, a Concord Middle School teacher who began teaching in 1969, and Allen Evans, a veteran who served during the Vietnam War, will also speak on the panel.
The Parent Education Program event will be held in Cannon School's Taylor Hall from 7 to 9 p.m.
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