Don’t be surprised to catch Hereford High School principal Joe Jira humming “Santa Claus is Coming to Town.” Except in this case, Santa has already come to Hereford.
The 62-year-old high school has been enlarged, updated, remodeled, improved, refurnished, modernized and air-conditioned over the last three years. The $50 million project should be complete by spring.
“It’s been like Christmas here. Hereford is a like a new school,” said Jira as he walked through the school, stopping every few feet to point out new features, such as motion-detector lights in every room and hallways lined with rows of gleaming new maroon lockers.
The main attraction is a three-story addition at the rear of the school that contains 11 science lab classrooms. It is connected to the school with a raised, two-level walkway with plenty of windows.
“This looks like a college campus now,” Jira said, looking out a window as he walked to the new wing. “We’ve been a high-performing school for years and we watched other schools getting renovated. Now it’s our turn. These kids deserve it.”
The top two floors of the addition are home to the science classrooms. Each lab table is equipped with water and gas fixtures to make experiments easy and safe to perform.
“We have everything we want,” said Rowdy Bibaud, who chairs the science department. “We had $200,000 to spend on everything from test tubes and beakers to computers.”
Hereford senior Steven DiBerardino is taking advanced placement physics and spends 90 minutes each day in one of the new labs.
“I can’t describe how much I enjoy the new science classrooms,” he said. “They are so much better than the old ones.”
Greater capacity
With the addition of those 11 classrooms, there is no more need for seven portable classrooms, which will be removed from the south side of the school this year.
The addition’s classrooms mean the school’s capacity has increased from 1,230 students to 1,487. Current enrollment stands at 1,192.
The first floor of the new wing is taken up by a 400-seat cafeteria, kitchen and school store. A window-filled wall lets students look out over the rolling hills behind the school.
That same view is shared by the cafeteria workers.
“We love being able to see outside,” said Lynda Dufek as she put out fresh fruit cups for students. “Now we know what’s going on with the weather. In the old cafeteria, we had no idea if it was raining or snowing until the end of the day.”
Dufek said she and others arrive at 6:30 each morning to make breakfast and prepare lunches that are taken to Fifth District, Prettyboy and Seventh District elementary schools whose cafeterias don’t have cooking capability. Then, it’s time to make lunch for the first group of students who arrive hungry at 10:15.
The cafeteria has an outdoor patio and Jira wants to ask the school’s alumni association to pay for picnic tables so students can eat outside. He said the alumni groups can use the cafeteria for reunions and the alums could play music from their era on what he said is “one amazing sound system.”
The school store, once operated out of a cart in a hallway, is now located in a room at the rear of the cafeteria. It is run by students who are studying accounting and marketing.
Business department chairman David Schreiner said students work at the store, keep records and do the accounting. They are also in charge of marketing and promotion. The store, which sells school supplies and Hereford clothing, is open a half-hour every morning and an hour at lunchtime.
“It seems like Hereford is a whole new school,” said senior Hunter Williams.
The $50 million project, of which roughly $39 million was construction costs, has been done in two phases, said Pete Dixit, Baltimore County Schools’ executive director for physical facilities. Starting in 2013, the auditorium and gym were renovated and a 150-car parking lot was added. He hopes the current phase will be done by the spring.
“We are very excited about this project because it came in on time and within budget,” he said. “It was a carefully orchestrated since there was only so much we could do while the students were in school.”
What’s old is new
While the wow factor belongs to the new wing, just about every aspect of the old school has been revamped. At a new front entrance, visitors must identify themselves before being allowed through locked doors into a two-story lobby.
Some 55 classroom have received new floors, new ceilings, new desks and new chairs. They all have Wi-Fi and each class is equipped with a projector mounted in the ceiling near the front of the room. Teachers can project any computer program onto whiteboards that replaced old-fashioned blackboards.
A basic television studio is now state-of-the-art. Morning announcements are televised and students who take the Advanced Technical Applications course do everything a veteran television reporter does.
“We also make videos, interview teachers and students and then edit it all,” said Susie Barr, a senior.
The technology department staff was given $20,000 to buy items such as a teleprompter, microphone, anchor desk, television cameras, hand-held video cameras and more.
This isn’t the first time the state and county have spent money on Hereford. A three-year, $14.6 million project started in 1990 to remove asbestos from the school’s pipes, ceilings and floors. During the summer of 1990, administrators and office personnel moved to Cockeysville Middle School where they conducted business. They moved back to Hereford a week before school started.
The next year, additions were made to the gym’s locker room, the school’s cafeteria and kitchen. Almost 25 years later, the old cafeteria and kitchen are being divided into rooms that will have new lives.
The kitchen will be transformed into a black box theater where drama students can rehearse and perform in a small, unadorned space. And the school’s musicians – choir, band and orchestra – will have their own rooms, too.
Work is yet to be completed on a new dance studio for the school’s 85 dancers whose former studio was in an old weight room. Their dressing room was in a nearby gym locker room.
Their new digs are bigger and will have plenty of mirrors and ballet barres, as well as a quality sound system and a dressing room.
“We have students named each year to all-state and all-county dance,” said Erin Norton, dance director. “I can’t wait to see what we can do given the new facilities and tools we’ll have available.”
