It is no secret that SHS is old– really old. In light of the asbestos found at Roxbury Elementary School, one of Solon City Schools District’s older buildings, the necessity of needing a new high school cannot be put off any longer.
Built in the 1940s, freshmen who are entering Solon High School are met with dingy-looking ceilings and stained floors. The atmosphere in the school is sad and depressing. SHS’s maze of hallways that were seemingly built on top of each other, with no significant planning, is daunting. Over the past few years, conditions have not gotten any better.
Superintendent Fred Bolden said the updates that are necessary cannot be done in a renovation.
“After a while, you can only repair so much,” Bolden said. “Lots of the classrooms there are very claustrophobic. They lack windows, they lack the expansive space. If you’ve been to new facilities or newer buildings, you can see the classrooms are bigger. The spaces for kids to learn are better, you can’t do [that] in a renovation. So, we could add another section onto the building, we could freshen up the paint, maybe tear down a few walls if we can, but lots of them are load bearing, so it’s hard to make bigger classrooms. All of that makes it so much more expensive than building new. ”
Another issue that needs to be fixed is the heating and cooling systems. When it’s 80 degrees outside, you need to wear a sweater and pants to school because otherwise you’ll have goosebumps. And you’d think if you asked a teacher to turn up the heat, they could, right? Well, they actually have no control over the building’s temperature at all.
Students are tired of having a gloomy learning area, there are very few classrooms with windows. If students are going to be kept inside all day, they should at least be able to have sunshine in the building.
Unless you eat in the commons, which only seniors have access to, the cafeteria is bare and has no windows. It feels like winter all year round. Lunch should be a time to take a break from feeling trapped in a school building. Instead, students are closed in.
One idea that would be nice is if there were a courtyard option for lunch. Multiple resident Solon students have said their favorite thing about the Solon Middle School was the courtyard lunches and study halls. Having the option to have fresh air on warmer days would be nice.
Math teacher Daniel McKeen, who has been teaching at SHS for 24 years, said he, too, thinks SHS could look better.
“Every school that I ever go to is nicer than this one,” McKeen said. “Now, it’s kind of a little embarrassing.”
McKeen said the building layout can make it difficult for new students, parents and teachers to find their way around.
“I think there’s so many problems with the way this school is currently laid out that aren’t really conducive to student learning, [such as] the distance it is from the end of the art wing to the math wing,” McKeen said.
It would be nice if all the classrooms that surround each other taught the same subject. On the second floor, there’s a hallway where the classrooms at the end are anatomy and computer classes, but the rest of the hallway is history classes.
McKeen said teachers’ lives would be easier if the classrooms were near each other.
“I’m never around other teachers who are teaching the same subjects as me,” McKeen said. “We’re not clustered into pods or anything that would really help the other geometry teachers. If I want to talk to them, they’re very far away, and it’s really challenging. If we could be teaching near other teachers who have the same topics, we could collaborate daily, as opposed to having to meet once a week. At my wife’s school, they’re in pods. Everybody who’s teaching the same thing are adjacent to each other, so they’re standing in the hall talking with each other between the different periods.”
Luckily, Solon City Schools began their planning process to build a new school three years ago. Bolden said that building a new high school is integral to their district’s mission.
“We as a district think it’s important,” Bolden said. “I think you guys as students would love to have a [new] facility. I just think it’s something that I think would be really positive for the entire community.”
The district decided that the new school would be built on the corner of SOM Center Road and Arthur Road, where Arthur Road Elementary School used to be before it was closed in May 2016.
“We own all of that land except for one house on SOM Center Road and the city pool,” Bolden said. “About a year ago, we entered into negotiations with the city to acquire that pool in exchange for [the Little League Baseball Diamonds that were school land], and they would give us some cash. There were months of negotiations back and forth until we agreed on a plan. Part of the agreement in that plan is that the city would sell us the pool, but then we had to agree to lease the pool back to them, basically for free, for five years. So, starting last year, it was around five years where we couldn’t build on that space even if we wanted to. That’s where it has to go because there’s no other place on our campus.”
Based on the district’s financial picture, in order to get a new high school built, the school needs to have a levy and a bond issue at some point in the future.
“It’s really super, super expensive to build a large high school,” Bolden said. “We’re talking about $150 to $200 million to build a building. It’s a significant amount of money, and the district doesn’t have that kind of money. In order to build something like that, you have to go to the voters and ask them for that money.”
Funding construction is not the only potential issue when it comes to building a new school.
“We also need money for things like operating the school districts, paying for electricity, paying teachers and administrators’ salaries, keeping the buses up and running,” Bolden said. “Having a shiny new high school and not being able to pay the people to come and work in it is kind of a problem. We can handle an old school, we can’t handle not being able to pay our bills.”
Still, Bolden said a new school is a very popular idea based on his experiences interacting with the Solon community.
“In our surveys about needs with the community, as well as anecdotally talking to people, it is a very popular idea,” Bolden said. “But again, there’s lots of people we don’t talk to in the community that don’t have students in the district. The schools are not something that they pay attention to. There’s a lot of those people that we have yet to talk to about this to see where they stand.”
In the future, when the time comes to vote on a levy or bond issue in support of Solon City Schools District, it is imperative that you vote yes.
Solon Schools already score extremely high with report cards and other educational aspects. Imagine what could happen if students were able to experience a nice school with more modern, up-to-date classrooms.
Students and staff members deserve better. We deserve to go to school without fear of exposure to asbestos. We deserve a school that has windows. We deserve not to feel trapped in a sad, dark building all day.
When the time comes, vote yes for our future.
