A new era for 'the Castle'

Architect details building plans

The Castle has been saved. The Hazleton Area School District decided months ago to refurbish old Hazleton High School and use it as a school again.

Wednesday, construction consultant Vern McKissick, whom the board hired in 2003 to draw up designs for the remodeled HHS, school board President Sean Shamany, and board members Kitty Warren and Dr. Bob Childs, gave those interested a tour of the building.

McKissick showed the condition the building is in now (which is actually pretty good) and his concepts of what it will look like when it's done.

The building will house grades three through eight. McKissick said it will be divided, with the third through six graders in the west side classrooms and the seventh and eighth-grade kids on the Third Base side.

"It will be sort of like two schools within a school," McKissick said.

The exterior of the building won't change much. The west side staff parking lot will be replaced by a playground. The Annex - built in the 1940s - will be torn down and replaced by a parking lot.

"There are concerns in the neighborhood about parking," McKissick said. "The lot where the Annex is will have room for about 80 cars. And we're looking at a staff of 82, so that covers most of it."

"Our goal is to make this school neighborhood friendly," McKissick added.

Inside, McKissick showed major new finds - a photograph of the building under construction in the spring of 1926, the original artist's conception and the original blue prints. They show an historical oddity. Plans were made, right from the beginning, for two additions: One on each side. "This is the one we're standing in," McKissick said, pointing to the blueprints. "The other one was never built. So, in a way, you could say we're finishing the original plans." An addition on the Third Base side is planned. It will house what McKissick called "the mechanics" - the heating plant and the like.

Inside, the tour began in the auditorium. McKissick said it would remain pretty much as it had been, though replacing the lost wall sconces will be hard. The skylights will remain. In fact, he plans on having one that was capped decades ago re-opened.

The gym will be the least changed. "We'll have to have the bleachers rebuilt," McKissick said. "And, believe it or not, there used to be windows here. We're planning on putting them back."

The pool will be filled in and turned into the cafeteria, though as much of the original tile work as possible will be saved.

McKissick said, however, the pool is in pretty good shape. Indeed, it appeared as though it could be filled and students could again be assigned "home spaces" in the pools, based on swimming ability, as it used to be.

The third floor will be "the most changed."

Walking through the former cafeteria, McKissick explained how the computer and technology labs would be configured there.

Next to it, the music room and the class room that was carved from it decades ago, will again be one large music room. On the other side of the third floor, the former library will become an art room. Some work has already begun. McKissick said he hopes to get specs together to put out requests for bids on the Annex demolition soon, with the actual razing in the fall. The roof will be replaced at the same time. The real reconstruction and re-configuration work will start next March. McKissick said it should take somewhere around a year - meaning the school can open in the middle of the 2005-06 school year. "Our plan is to move some kids in before construction is completed," McKissick said.

When finished, the classrooms will be bigger than they are now, as the state Department of Education has minimum classroom sizes. Right now, there are about 60. When finished there will be about 40. Closing the former high school was controversial.

It finished its term as a high school when Hazleton Area High School opened for the 1992-93 school year. It was a junior high school for a few years thereafter, closing for good (or at least, what seemed for good at the time) in 1997. There were plans to demolish it and replace it with a new school. But the "Save The Castle" movement stopped that.

Ever since then, several school boards have debated whether to re-use it. Childs has favored re-using it ever since he was elected. But the biggest driver to refurbish and reuse the school was former board member Gil Degenhart, who rarely missed an opportunity to state how the building would be a big plus for HASD. But when the student influx began in earnest a few years ago, HHS attracted new attention as a possible solution. Degenhart, more than anybody else, pushed to have the building included in any overcrowding plans.

When the board hired McKissick to put together scenarios under which overcrowding could be relieved, it asked him to look at HHS and see whether it could be used. McKissick said it not only could be, but that using it made the most sense - it could be finished, and overcrowding relieved, at least a year sooner than building a new school.

Shamany and Warren are both HHS alumni. Childs isn't, but knows the building well, as he is close to Tom Gabos and Bob Tombasco, the two volunteer caretakers who kept the building from falling into the states of disrepair which led to H.E. Grebey's demolition and a virtually certain repeat with D.A. Harman.

All three were quite pleased with McKissick plans. "It's a dream come true," Warren said.