Shelby High School Visit

Last month I visited the Shelby Senior High School for the first time in probably 10 years. Wow. It's exactly the same as when I went there in the early 1980s and yet lots of details are very different. Of course, the architecture has remained the same since its building in, when, 1968??

I visited the High School for the annual Arts & Crafts fair which takes place every October in the Shelby High School basketball gymnasium and also in the YMCA gymnasium next door.


What I noticed immediately about the differences in the Shelby gymnasium is that it has a new scoreboard, new wall-art, and - the biggest change of all - the brand new bleachers! I don't know when they tore out all those long wooden planks but replaced them with short sections of red-or-gray fiberglass ones. That must have been a HUGE expense but it's good to know the high school, school board, boosters, or "other" take such pride in wanting the best for their kids.

The basketball bleachers were always an ominous mechanical mechanism. So many times I found myself sneaking around underneath with a little nervousness, not knowing WHEN the bleachers would be detracted, certainly slicing-and-dicing my body into an unrecognizable pile until the cleaning crew would find me after the next basketball game. At pep rallies we band members would sometimes drop our music, jackets, or even trombone slides into the unreachable depths below.

Same goes for the Shelby High School cafeteria. It was (and surely STILL IS) another location for all kinds of eating, flirting, food-fighting, and lots of other nonsense. The dining hall looks exactly the same, complete with trophy case and photos of past football & basketball team champions, top athletes, and academic overachievers. The only difference I could see are those cool-new cafeteria dining tables! They're still the fold-up/stand-up variety but they seem to have a plastic or fiberglass top as opposed to the old particle board we had. Also, the seats seem to be retractable, round plastic stools. We had the run-of-the-mill stackable chairs. I have to wonder how many children have fallen off of these new, round seats with only one leg.


I'd like to someday take a tour of the Shelby High School halls, visit some of my old classrooms, check out the empty locker rooms and weight room, and even look into the bathrooms. Surely they look tiny now. Almost all of my teachers have since retired except for one or two. Sometimes I'll run into the retired ones in the stores and shops around Shelby or Mansfield. It's always nice to see them.