Once the announcement is made, a certain kind of silence descends upon an old school building. Although they walk more slowly, people still use the hallways. Door frames, trophy cases, the corner of a locker that was once theirs—things they wouldn’t typically touch. That was the scene on Saturday at Arthur Voaden Secondary School in St. Thomas, where hundreds of former students and faculty members returned for one last time before the century-old structure permanently closes as a high school.
Named for Arthur Voaden, the school’s founding principal, it began as a vocational school in 1926. It has endured decades of changing educational trends, multiple economic downturns, and a depression. The Thames Valley District School Board claimed that the expense of maintaining it was what it was unable to outlast. Just months before the school’s 100th anniversary, the board declared in April that it would close this month due to long-term maintenance and infrastructure repairs that it deemed unsustainable.
People like Betty Bekaan, who co-chairs the school’s centenary committee and attended AVSS in the late 1970s, were taken aback by the announcement. “It is not just a building, it’s a family,” she replied. It’s a sentiment that sounds almost cliched until you see grown adults cry while describing a gymnasium floor or a cafeteria mural, at which point it ceases to sound cliched at all.
The open house itself felt more like a reunion held inside a building with an expiration date than a farewell tour. The old gym was where Drenise and John Cowlard, two high school sweethearts who met at AVSS in the 1960s, spent most of their time together. With rugby, football, basketball, and track patches still sewn on, John wore his original varsity jacket as a small act of preservation in a structure that won’t be around for very long. The teams were known as the Red Devils, not the Vikings, back then. It’s a small detail, but it conveys how much has quietly changed inside those walls while the bricks haven’t changed.
Retired journalist Mark Butterwick, who began working at the school in 1967, came back with a camera and took pictures of a building he had previously covered for a living. He gestured to a mural created by his graduating class that had survived for almost 60 years. The fact that the mural has endured for as long as it has, retaining its color for longer than anyone likely anticipated, has an almost stubborn quality.
On Saturday, not everyone in the building was thinking back to earlier decades. A few were from the last group of Arthur Voaden students to graduate last week. Bugg Ball, who is moving to the University of Guelph, expressed his hope that the $44 million replacement planned by the school board, which will house about 700 students, will preserve the trades programs that made AVSS unique. It’s a valid question, and the board hasn’t yet provided a complete response.
Although it will not take place inside the school it was intended to honor, the centenary committee still intends to celebrate its 100th anniversary in September. The relocation of the event to St. Anne’s Centre is a workable but somewhat depressing workaround. There will be alumni get-togethers arranged by graduating year, old photos, and decades of instructors. It won’t be the same as having the celebration inside the building. There is nothing that can quite take its place.
Both the physical structure’s fate and the fate of artifacts like that 1967 mural are still unknown. Even though they are aware that the doors won’t open the same way again, most of the people who walked those halls on Saturday appear to be thankful that they had one last opportunity.
