ELYRIA — The new Elyria High School is still years away from completion, but students — many of whom will be long graduated when the building opens — are speaking up now as to what they want in the facility.

Sylvia Taylor wants to see lots of trees, bushes and a rock garden.

“It would be nice to see something that is calming because the rest of the school day is so hectic,” said the 16-year-old sophomore. “I know I won’t be there to see it, but I want my little brothers to go to school in a nice place.”

School officials are listening.

In the coming weeks, the high school’s core design team will host two design sessions to gather ideas for the art and science courtyards, which the soon-to-be constructed academic wing will be built around. The architects ultimately will design each courtyard — roughly 7,000 square feet each and full of natural light — using some of the students’ design elements.

“It is really about giving them an opportunity — since they are going to be the primary users — to give us some preliminary designs of the spaces,” said Katie Manwell, educational planner with Architectural Vision Group. “This way, one day students will walk into those courtyards knowing they positively contributed to those courtyards.”

Student involvement has always been the goal of the district when the $68 million project became a reality thanks to the passage last year of a school bond issue.

While the building will eventually house the district’s ninth- through 12th-graders, it is really a community facility in every sense of the word, said Superintendent Paul Rigda.

The daylong design sessions will gather input from about 20 students and two or three staff members who will first hear a presentation by core members of the design team. Once they hear what each 70-by-99-foot courtyard should include from an architectural standpoint, each group will be asked to brainstorm ideas about what the courtyards should resemble.

While the science courtyard will be a perfect space to study weather and native plants, and conduct soil experiments, the art courtyard will be an ideal place for outdoor art displays and work areas.

Eighteen-year-old Karel Taylor wishes the art courtyard were in place now.“The art room we have now is basically in a garage. There are no windows and the room basically has no natural light,” the 12th-grade student said. “I want the kids who are going to our school to have a nice place to go and hang out during art classes.”

Karel said that, as a landscape painter, she lives to create pieces from the beauty of nature.
“The courtyard needs lots of seating, plants and sculptures,” Karel said. “We are the ones who are going to be there every day and we should like the environment we are in.”

To prepare for the design sessions, students in the art classes have been making sculptures and art pieces that would fit well into the courtyard, student Sylvia Taylor said, adding that it has been the best part of the new school concept.

“All the students are really excited about the whole outdoorsy parts,” she said. “I know in the science area, they will have a pond, so that’s pretty cool.”

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