Hilliard school district starts year with new, updated facilities
Repurposing old buildings adds about 1,000 seats.
The first day of classes for Hilliard City Schools was Wednesday, about a week after the start for most other suburban districts in central Ohio. The district needed that extra time because it has spent the past nine weeks shuffling their school buildings.
And now 870 seventh- and eighth-graders are attending a new, $38 million Memorial Middle School at 2900 Walker Road. It’s next door to Bradley High School, creating a cohesive campus for grades 7-12 where one hadn’t existed.
About 4 miles away, the old Memorial Middle School, at 5600 Scioto Darby Road, has been transformed into the new Hilliard Station Sixth Grade School. It has a new roof, and the main office and media center were gutted and updated.
The former Hilliard Station building, at 3859 Main St., is now the Innovative Learning Hub, part of the three-building Innovative Learning Campus that also includes the nearby McVey Innovative Learning Center and the adjacent annex. Its upgrade has included replacing all the furniture to make the spaces flexible and collaborative.
At the Hub, middle-schoolers will be able to take classes that are not offered at Heritage, Weaver or Memorial, including American Sign Language and German. Others are “Core Infusions,” special multidisciplinary courses centered on a theme. An example is a seventh-grade “design thinking” class that incorporates language arts, science and public speaking.
Craig Vroom, formerly the principal of Weaver Middle School, will be principal at the Hub. Chad Schulte, an assistant principal at Darby High School, will become principal of Weaver.
This whole building plan originated with a facilities plan created three years ago and is being paid for through a $50 million bond issue that voters approved in November 2016, said Deputy Superintendent Mike McDonough. If all goes as expected with Memorial, he said, the district will come in $2 million under the $38 million construction budget; that leftover money can be spent on improvements throughout the district.
The Hilliard district had 16,500 students in June, an increase of almost 1,800, or 12 percent, in five years. Enrollment is expected to top 16,600 this fall. An additional 4,000 housing units — both multifamily and single-family — are being built in the district’s 59 square miles.
Repurposing the old buildings has in effect added 1,000 seats to the district, said McDonough.
Memorial Middle School’s floor tiles, walls, lockers, classroom chairs and murals feature shades of the school colors: royal blue, silver, black and white.
“You kinda gotta like blue,” Principal Barry Bay said with a chuckle.
The official capacity of the 140,000-square-foot building is 1,000 students, based on 25 per classroom, but it could fit 1,250 if needed, McDonough said. Its design took inspiration from the other two middle schools, built in 1994 and 1996, but administrators and architects
The Hilliard district had 16,500 students in June, an increase of almost 1,800, or 12 percent, in five years. Enrollment is expected to top 16,600 this fall. An additional 4,000 housing units — both multifamily and single-family — are being built in the district’s 59 square miles.
tweaked the plans to make them more functional and reflect trends in education.
The media center is on the first floor next to the “cafetorium” to make it feel more public and encourage use. Five collaborative spaces, with lounge-like furniture and wall-mounted bigscreen TVs, are in the hallways to allow students from different classrooms to work together. And the hallways in the new Memorial are 2 feet wider and have lockers on only one side, helping the flow of traffic.
Every teacher at Memorial has a laptop instead of a desktop computer, and they’ve all been given mobile lecterns so they can teach from wherever they choose in the room. And there’s a notable lack of bookshelves in classrooms: Textbooks are mostly found on the students’ iPads.
Bay said administrators from neighboring Bradley, the district’s newest high school, had visited over the summer to explore.
“They were saying they couldn’t believe how much has changed (in education) in just the 10 years since Bradley was built,” Bay said.