I recently wrote a Mel’s Musings about the possible construction of a new high school. The last time Mitchell had to decide about building a new high school was the early 1960’s. In many ways that was a much easier decision than the current School Board and citizens of Mitchell face today. Back in the 1960’s all the community really had to worry about was the cost. Education, and its delivery, had remained the same for decades. That’s not true today.
When I first started at Michell High in the fall of 1982, teachers were still showing 16mm films on two reels. The type of movies you see depicted from time to time in the television show M*A*S*H. Films then moved to ¾ inch video tape; they resembled hard back books in size. The next step was ½ inch video tape, the kind most of us are familiar with. Laser discs were next, followed by DVDs and now streaming.
In the fall of 1982, if teachers were going to reproduce a worksheet for mass distribution to students, we still used the mimeograph machine and carbon paper. Personal computers were restricted to one classroom where students took computer class. Yvonne Palli was our first computer teacher. Eventually staff had an Apple IIE computer complete with floppy discs for data storage (state of the art at the time) to take attendance and do grades on, but students did not have any computers, let alone cell phones. MHS still taught a typing class on electric typewriters then.
When I retired in 2018, Mitchell High School was a very different place than it was when I started almost forty years earlier. In 1982, there was nearly a dance a month. There was a “Back to School” dance, a Homecoming Dance, a “Holiday” dance (in later years) then in February a Sadie Hawkins dance (where the girls asked the boys), an all school formal (for a couple of years) and Prom. By the time I retired there was only a Homecoming Dance and the Prom. However, the Homecoming Dance was hanging by a thread when I left MHS.
I was involved with raising money for the prom in some way, shape or form my entire thirty-six-year career via the magazine sale. I helped motivate kids into bringing in around a million dollars (gross) over that time span. My last year at MHS, the juniors didn’t reach the goal and instead of bearing the consequences of their failure, the junior parents pitched in. When the prom arrived, those parents were aghast. All the money they helped to raise, the money they donated and the time and effort they put into to decorating was “wasted” because so many kids went through the Grand March and kept right on walking out of the Corn Palace, which was not unusual. It’s also not uncommon for the dance portion of the prom to peter out by ten or ten-thirty.
In the early years there was a pep assembly for every home football game and basketball game. Now, there is a Homecoming pep assembly and that’s it. Conferences used to be the “only” way to communicate with parents, in addition to calling them at home on their landline and parents really HATED it when a teacher would call. Today, there is also email and Campus – which parents can access anytime and see how their children are doing whenever the parent decides to check it. It begs the question of whether conferences are even necessary anymore?
Baccalaureate used to be a must attend event. There were some years when I attended where the teacher chaperones outnumbered the students and local ministers didn’t bother to show up. Every church already celebrates their senior student members, why is a public school organizing, hosting and chaperoning a religious event that few people want to attend?
I take this walk down memory lane because it directly impacts decisions that the School Board is going to make about a new high school. Will high school be like it was in 1962 with all the students in attendance in the classroom with a teacher in the front of the room or will it be like my final years at MHS? Will it be a community experience, complete with school spirit and shared remembrances? In my last years there were “full-time” students who didn’t set foot in the high school during the school day. They took online classes from SDSU, USD and other institutions. They attended, in person, Dakota Wesleyan University and Mitchell Technical College rather than classes at MHS. They took online courses from Mitchell High School, like World History, which did not require physical attendance in a classroom. There was nearly a whole Covid school year where all classes were streamed and now many area schools no longer have the traditional snow day, instead they have “e-learning days”. Education had become a solitary, individual experience and MHS an attendance center rather than a beloved alma mater of shared high school memories.
How we think education will be delivered and where students will consume that instruction makes a difference to how large a new school is, in terms of classroom space. If everything is going to be streamed and accessed on the computer remotely then some classrooms along with work areas and equipment storage spaces etc. are not necessary.
Will athletics continue to be a thing a half a century from now or will MHS become like the high school in Japan (Esports Koutou Gakuin in Toyko) and simply have Esports in which case new athletic facilities and spaces will be a waste of time and money?
How will wireless technology be integrated into a new facility, and will it be designed so it can be upgraded easily? In the 1990’s, Governor Janklow had a major initiative to “wire the schools” for technology and soon after the project was competed wired technology was on its way out in favor of wireless communications and computing.
I don’t envy the decisions the School Board has to make and wish them well looking into their crystal ball for the future. The only thing that is certain is it will be cheaper to build what the Board knows is needed now, instead of planning on expensive additions in the future when costs will inevitably be higher. Abraham Lincoln was right when he said, “You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.”