North Royalton High School Principal and Alumnus, Sean Osborne, met his future wife in Cafeteria Two.
North Royalton Alumni Association President Nick Phillips remembers the exact spot in the old section of the high school where he worked up the courage to ask out the girl of his dreams (who later became his wife).
These are just two stories, from two graduates reflecting on memories made within the walls of NRHS; there are thousands of other memories out there and thousands of other memories yet to be made in the Ridge Road building by future graduates.
As part of the high school’s ongoing construction and renovation project, sections of the building that are older than the 1976 addition will soon be demolished, and school leaders are giving the community the chance to say good-bye to the old and hello to the new. Building farewell tours are set for Feb. 27 and March 3, 6 and 10. All farewell tour time slots have been filled, Osborne said during a recent walk-through of the high school awarded to the Royalton Recorder.
“It was important to give the community a chance to see the building before we took it down and to also give them a chance to see what we’re doing with tax-payer money with the new construction,” Osborne said. “In a perfect world, we would have had a true open house and allowed people to move about freely and have many more people in at a time. But in order to keep people safe and do our due diligence, we had to set it up in the way we have.”
Phillips said he was getting multiple requests from alumni who wanted to see the old part of the high school before it was demolished. Together with school leadership, the idea to host building farewell tours was born.
“It’s like visiting a historical site,” Phillips, a 1966 graduate, said. “It’s like our own monument to our own history. Taking a tour is a great time to let your human side rise to the surface and appreciate your hometown and your own lives and the memories of your friends. When we think back to our high school experience, we think of everyone we knew, and we think of them as they were. This is a big opportunity to connect and to take time out from our busy lives, time out from Covid, the economy and politics and reflect on your own life. You think of the good times that you had and how they all stem from that area.”
Construction at the school continues to move along rapidly and is slated to be complete by next winter. Those lucky enough to snag a farewell tour time slot will not only have the chance to reminisce in the old sections of the building, but also to be wowed by the new design. There are 750 people signed up for farewell tours, which will be staggered and following all safety protocols.
The new space boasts everything from an expansive “Den” area for congregating, lunchtime, morning check-in, and study hall, to classroom areas with small-group discussion spaces and large lecture rooms that don’t miss a beat with the latest technology. There is also flexible-use furniture, mounted TV sets with their own internal network of programming, an impressive broadcast journalism studio, a large cafeteria featuring various meal choice stations, a state-of-the-art media center and much more. Departments are also grouped together, as opposed to being all spread out in different parts of the building.
“One thing we did that some schools don’t is we engaged all the stakeholders all the way through the process and we brought in each department and asked them, ‘In your space, what’s important to you? What would make doing your job better?’” Osborne said.
The results of that input are nothing short of incredible: the science department has individual prep rooms designed for their specific disciplines, the physics room has a portable demonstration table and a ceiling that allows for the hanging of heavy apparatus to better explain concepts, the world language rooms have spaces for cooking demonstrations as food so heavily encompasses a culture, the art wing has ample natural light, the main office has advanced security measures coupled with an array of connecting offices for athletic and activity directors, and the list only goes on throughout the sleek new space.
To further up the wow factor, certain school staples are also being redesigned. For example, lockers will no longer be assigned to a particular student for the duration of the year, but rather follow suit with the concept of locker rental. A student can use any available locker anywhere in the building at any time, punch in a lock code and use that locker for however long they would like – a single class period or an entire day and evening – similar to renting a locker at Cedar Point before boarding a roller coaster.
“It really is the importance we should be putting on schools,” Osborne said at the start of the newspaper’s tour. “If you go to any of the tech companies or large corporations, this is how they look and the environment that they work in.”
Phillips echoed the sentiment.
“It is definitely state-of-the-art and brand new,” he said of his tour. “The reaction is that you wish you were a student or a teacher there because it’s such a wonderful place designed for teaching and today’s age where technology is further advanced. Now, with the technology of this new facility, it will take us into the next 40 or 50 years easily. It’s very clean, very modern, and very inspiring and motivating. I hope the students will appreciate it as they are coming up through the years. This will be their normal.”
By SARA MACHO HILL
Contributing Writer