School is out

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AMSDEN - Closure of a junior high school means the end of an era but also is the next step in getting the district's preK-12 campus, its principal said.

Norm Elchert, who serves as the principal of Lakota Junior High School and Lakota East Elementary School, said everyone is anxious for the new building.

The junior high building, which is more than 85 years old and has served more than just junior-high students, is closing two years ahead of schedule, and the Lakota Local School District is building a preK-12 facility on the site of the high school.

"It's costly to run this (building)," Elchert said about the closure. "Plus with our enrollment, we can do this."

Elchert said next year, Lakota East will become a middle school for grades six through eight, and he will serve as its principal. Fifth-graders will go to Central Elementary School in Risingsun, which will house second- through fifth-graders, he said.

Thursday evening, the junior high school was open for people to take a tour before it is demolished. Elchert said officials likely are looking at the fall for demolition.

Russell Dahms of Tiffin and Barry Finsel of Fostoria, friends who were in the special education program together at Lakota, attended the open house and stopped in the gymnasium.

"I used to play basketball down here all the time, quite a bit," Finsel said.

Finsel, who estimated his last time in the building prior to Thursday was in the late 1970s, recalled the school's playground and said he played a little bit of baseball at the school. He said the gymnasium's backboards, benches, lights and scoreboard are different, but chairs on one side of the gymnasium are the same.

"They didn't have (any) mats on the wall," he said.

Finsel also remembered students going to the gymnasium to watch movies and recalled a projector used to show them. He said one movie he watched was Walter Cronkite talking about the turn of the century and what life would be like in the year 2000.

"Well, he we are," he said.

Finsel moved to Lakota West Elementary School in Bradner for third grade through sixth grade and Risingsun for seventh and eighth grade. He said he went to Lakota High School 1972-75.

Dahms said he graduated a year after Finsel, in 1976. He said the rooms brought back memories. He said it was "awesome" to be in the building Thursday, and it brought back his childhood.

He said it reminded him of things that took place when he was a child growing up there.

"I haven't been back here for quite a while," he said.

On the Web:

Lakota Local School District:

www.lakota-sandusky.k12.oh.us