Confederate widow Laetitia Nutt and her daughters offered the first school for Sanibel's children in their home, The Gables, in 1889. Sanibel's first tax-supported school opened in 1892 on Bailey Road in a small schoolhouse that cost $75 to construct. A new school was built on Periwinkle Way in 1903, and that schoolhouse later closed in 1963, became the Pirate's Playhouse community theater, and was relocated to the Sanibel Historical Village and Museum in 2004 for public viewing. Black children on Sanibel did not have access to formal education on the island until 1927, when sharecropper Isaac Johnson converted an abandoned Baptist church into a schoolhouse. Lee County bought the building two years later and agreed to operate it as a school for black children as long as at least seven children were enrolled. In the 1940s, the island's black population dwindled because of the country's involvement in World War II, forcing the school to close from 1940 to 1946. Until 1964, all black students on Sanibel were sent by separate ferry and bus to a segregated school in Fort Myers because they were not allowed to share transportation with white children. In 1963, the Sanibel School was built, and the following year it became the first racially integrated public school in Lee County. Today it is a National Blue Ribbon School recognized by the U.S. Department of Education for academic excellence.