S.B. Butler School Assistant Principal Pamela Porter has a unique perspective on the now-shuttered elementary school, having spent more than two decades there as a teacher and administrator as well as several years as a student back in the 1970s.

“Parents come in and say ‘This looks like the kind of school I went to as a kid,’” Porter said. “They like it because it’s cozy.”

A little too cozy for the modern world of education. The school closed in June at the end of the school year, and most S.B. Butler kids will be sent in the fall to the brand new Mystic River Magnet School, at the site of the old Cutler Middle School on Fishtown Road, while others will attend the Thames River Magnet School.

Claude Chester and Mary Morrisson schools are also closing at the end of the year, marking the end of an era for small neighborhood schools in Groton.

S.B. Butler’s opening in 1953 came just one year after Claude Chester’s startup and a decade before Mary Morrisson came onboard.

What makes low-slung S.B. Butler unique is its location within a quiet neighborhood in Mystic, rather than next to a major thoroughfare.

Butler’s appearance in a bucolic setting reflected the history of education in West Mystic, going back more than 200 years,

“The area’s first schoolhouse — the one-room Packer School — stood a few hundred yards down Ocean View Avenue from today’s Butler School, serving the children of local farmers and mariners from 1818 until the West Mystic School opened in 1861,” according to a school history.

“For more than 90 years, that two-room schoolhouse (which still stands on Noank Road, next to the Mystic Market) provided the elementary education for generations of children.”

Butler opened to students for the first time on Sept. 9, 1953, according to the school history. The school had only seven classrooms, plus a gymnasium, cafeteria, offices and utility room, but a school history called it a “modern marvel” compared to the 1911 Mystic Academy building that was then the most recent school construction in the area.

Still, it wasn’t big enough to hold all elementary grades, so kindergarten through first grade had to meet at the old West Mystic school on Noank Road.

“The seven classrooms were needed for grades 2 through 8,” states the history. “When the junior high school opened, the kindergartners and first graders moved up to S.B. Butler.”

Amelia M. Palmer was named the first school principal in 1953 and hosted an open house for more than 300 residents. Unfortunately, desks for students had not yet arrived, and teachers’ desks and chairs were even further delayed.

But the late Town Historian Carol Kimball remembered S.B. Butler as a modern place when she started teaching there in the 1950s.

“She taught at Mystic Academy, which had no water above the first floor,” according to the history. “After Butler was open for a few years, she asked Miss Palmer if she could be transferred to the ‘luxurious’ S.B. Butler, which had sinks in every classroom. Art projects and blackboard cleaning were much easier after that!”

Designed by the New London architecture firm Schofield and Lindsay, the school was completed in less than a year for a cost of $350,000, according to school records. Ten acres of land was purchased from the Denison family, which previously had used it for farming.

“Veronica Packer, who was the school secretary for many years ... remembers cows grazing where the school now stands,” according to the undated history.

The school was named after Groton’s first school superintendent, Sylvester Benjamin Butler, who served in the post for nearly three decades. He died in 1970 in a car accident at age 77, according to a school scrapbook.

“Butler ... brought local education into the modern era when he supervised the expansion of the school system between 1951 and 1956,” the history stated. “An expert on federal acts pertaining to school construction, Butler secured approximately three million dollars of government funding for Groton’s school building program.”

Palmer served as principal of Butler School until 1967, helping to oversee a growing population of students from the baby boom generation.

“The population exceeded the school’s capacity from the start,” according to the school history.

Later, in the 1990s, with Groton’s school population in decline and educational philosophy moving in different directions, Cutler Middle School started taking in sixth graders from S.B. Butler. But that same decade children from Mystic Academy and the Freeman Hathaway School were shifted to Butler and Noank schools.

In December 2007, Noank School closed and the new Northeast Academy opened the next month, as school populations shifted yet again.