The News Herald (Willoughby, OH)
NEW SCHOOL OPENS
District to host ceremony to begin demolition of old high school
“When you talk about a 100-yearold building at its core, you’re still talking about a facility that’s not conducive to 21st century education.” Superintendent Renee Willis
After several years in the making, the new Richmond Heights Secondary School has reached completion and began welcoming students back to classrooms in late March.
According to Richmond Heights Superintendent Renee Willis, middle schoolers who chose to return to in-person classes got to check out
their new building for the first time on March 29, and the high schoolers followed soon after on April 6.
The new building is a combination of both a middle school and high school, grades seven through 12, but the campus is divided into distinct wings to keep the middle and high school classrooms separate.
Willis said construction crews officially broke ground on the new school in 2019, following the passage of a 2017 tax levy to provide funding for the new campus and some other amenities for residents.
She added that the timeline was in step with her goals for improving the district’s school facilities.
“When I started in 2014, one of the first tasks was to get a committee and do a five-year strategic plan,” she said. “In the five-year strategic plan, one of the priorities was facilities, and the hope was that by the end of that five-year plan, which started in 2015 and ended in 2020, that we will be either cutting ribbon or breaking ground, which we did.”
She explained that the old Richmond Heights High School building was originally constructed in 1921 and the outdated facilities had raised concerns with the Ohio Facilities
Construction Commission and the district’s board, prompting the push for a new campus.
“When you talk about a 100-year-old building at its core, even though it had several additions after that, you’re still talking about a facility that’s not conducive to 21st century education,” Willis said.
The new school building will double as the new home of the Richmond Heights branch of the Cuyahoga County Public Library, currently located at 5235 Wilson Mills Road. Willis said that the current branch location will relocate this summer once the finishing details have been put into the new library, which is attached to the school.
Willis said that now that the new school is complete, they are moving into phase two this summer, which includes demolition of the old campus to make room for more parking, driveways and landscaping.
She said the school will hold a “wrecking ball ceremony” open to the community at noon on April 12 as the demolition crew arrives to take the first wrecking ball swing at the old high school.
Willis said students had been learning remotely since the initial shutdown in March 2020, and many still are.
She said they had about 50 percent of middle schoolers return to in-person classes when the new building opened, and were waiting on attendance data from the high school’s first day of classes.
However, Willis said many of the students that did return were perhaps even more excited to see each other than they were the new campus.
“We have to acknowledge that they have not been in school, so just them seeing each other was more fascinating than seeing a building because they’ve been socially isolated,” she said, “And when I saw the kids, it was so emotional, because it’s like — wow, you’ve grown. It’s been a year.
“But it’s new, it’s modern, it’s 21st century and beyond. And so they’re just navigating and trying to learn the layout.”