EVERY YEAR brings news coverage hailing pledges by top officials to restore the abandoned Wiley H. Bates High School building in Annapolis -- and then nothing.

As The Sun's Tom Pelton pointed out in an article last week, trees now grow out of the school's floor, the roof is collapsing and the walls are smeared with graffiti.

The county plans to spend $6 million to repair the roof and remove asbestos beginning next month. But grander plans for a community center with 85 senior-citizen apartments there are still up in the air. The county's still searching for a developer to join the renovation, estimated at $16 million, so this story is far from settled.

Bates was the county's high school for African-Americans from 1932 until desegregation in 1966. Its doors closed for good in 1981. Although the red-brick building is unremarkable architecturally, it is listed on the National Register of Historical Places because of its historic and cultural significance in Anne Arundel County.

The school is an artifact of Maryland's Jim Crow era, when Anne Arundel clung to some of the most deplorable practices of segregation. The county refused to build a high school for blacks until 1917, 52 years after the Civil War. When it finally agreed to educate black teen-agers, they were housed in the Stanton School.

By the 1930s, Stanton was crowded. Thanks to a $500 donation by Wiley H. Bates, a grocer and Annapolis' first black alderman, the county built a seven-room high school on Smithville Street. Over the years, the building was enlarged. At its peak in the 1950s, it enrolled as many as 2,000 students, bused there from throughout the county.

The restoration effort should begin without further delay. A restored Bates High should be a monument to all those educated at the school -- and a reminder of an era not as distant as some believe and whose consequences linger.