By Nico King Gile,
Staff Writer.
Over the first month of school you may have noticed that certain things are missing. Maybe the lack of a third period bell that can be heard outside. Maybe the relocated College and Career Center or maybe the continually congested student parking lot drop-off area. Certainly, you don’t even have any classes in DeSoto this year.
It almost seemed preposterous when we heard about it last year. “It’s funny, I didn’t actually think that we would end up moving,” recalled English teacher Johnathan Gregory. It was a great loss for the teachers, many of whom had been in DeSoto Hall for dozens of years. The English teachers in particular lost organization: “Now I’m separated from many of my English colleagues,” said Gregory.
There are physical challenges, too, for Gregory: “To have lost a large classroom. . . everybody feels very cramped together.” Students have been forced out of certain overfull classes, and the staff have been working hard to make sure that most kids could take the classes they wanted. They scrapped and rebuilt the master schedule multiple times. Another issue is student drop-off. The administration this year said to “use the drop off. . . area in the student parking lot.” This is a flip compared to the many years before where they strictly said not to. This causes difficulty for student drivers—which the parking lot is specifically for—when attempting to get in.
Despite all that, people are still enjoying this new school year. Senior Zoey Blake said, “I feel more connected being so close to everyone.” Gregory said, “I like the energy here.” In this condensing of our classrooms, there is also a condensing of our spirit, as we are pulled closer together in the Main Building. Looking back on the expectations of anxiety and gloom that were often shared, it’s clear that this is better than those. While it will be a struggle to fit so many people in one building, it was this way for 100 years.
While there have been a lot of difficult and bad parts of this transition, there is also a lot of spirit, and as a school, as Panthers, we can make it work.
