The windows of the looming, castle-like Lockland School building are boarded up, and its rooms are empty.
But it isn't abandoned — it's just being reborn.
Lockland's school district serves as a kind of heart for this village of 3,500 people. A few years ago, it came to a crossroads. Its iconic high school — prominently visible from I-75 — desperately needed updating, and it would take a bond issue to fund the work.
It would have been cheaper to tear down the 1912 building and start anew. But Superintendent Bob Longworth says after a year of talking with the community, the district knew that wasn't an option.
"It was made abundantly clear to us — do not bring an issue to the community to tear down this school and replace it with a new one," he said. "Just the architectural significance and the beauty of the building sitting in the village. Everyone knew there was no way that could be recreated."
So Lockland voted on a $4.7 million bond issue — the community's share of the $30 million renovation effort. State funding covers the majority of the rest of the cost.
Why it means so much to residents
No one understands the significance of the high school building — and Lockland School District more broadly — better than Mert Fritsch. She graduated from Lockland high school in 1970 and spent decades in various roles for the district.
Now retired, she still comes in most days to organize the school's extensive archive or do whatever else is needed.
As she sorts through the school's thousands of historical documents, she holds up one she finds especially fascinating — the 1937 graduating class composite. She points out that Black students' portraits are displayed prominently with the white students — something very uncommon during the era of segregation.
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"You see at the top row — not the bottom row — African American," she says. "We were not segregated here at all."
Such photos suggest students attended school together in the Lockland High School building until at least 1938.
That year, some Black students in Lockland's Greenwood area would end up going to the new all-Black Lockland Wayne School, created by a $50,000 bond issue Lockland voters approved. They joined other Black students from Lincoln Heights and other nearby communities. The school was run by the Lockland School District. By 1954, a Cincinnati Post article noted all Black students in Lockland attended Lockland Wayne. That school closed in 1958, but not before winning two state basketball championships in 1952 and 1955. Twenty of its graduates went on to Ivy League colleges.
Many residents have fond memories of going to school at Lockland Wayne and Lockland High. Fritsch says there's something special about the way generations of Lockland residents have come through the tiny school district — one of the smallest and lowest income in the state.
She can find report cards from current students' grandparents, handwritten board of education notes from the 19th Century, or trace whole lives in the school's archives.
One woman shows up in the school's early graduating classes, then pops up again 50 years later, visiting from Los Angeles for a class reunion.
There's an emotional attachment people form with the school, she says.
"There's a common thread in Lockland Schools that's so unique," she says. "It's meant so much to a lot of people."
What's changing
The district has struggled with a lack of resources since industry left over the last few decades.
It has one of the highest percentages of low-income students in the region. Test scores have been low and the teacher turnover rate was as high as 50% just a few years ago. That creates unique challenges, Fritsch says.
"Even though we only have 450 kids K-12, we still have the same mandates of the state," she says. "So we're doing the same stuff day by day by day as Princeton, Wyoming, Sycamore. Our numbers are just lower."
Superintendent Longworth says things are changing, though — starting with a new approach the district adopted a few years back that centers the overall wellness of students.
"If we're not really wrapping around services in every way needed, we're missing opportunities to grow kids," he says.
Longworth says the school is still very focused on fundamental education, but also takes on the role of providing other needs.
He mentions an issue Lockland has had with fires in houses and apartments. The school has become a place where resources can be directed quickly to students and their families.
"We were able to get two families the things they needed the night of a fire last school year," he says. "We weren't equipped to do that in the past."
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The district has six employees dedicated to student wellness. They try to address the factors that can stand in the way of traditional learning — whether it's childhood trauma, hunger, or housing instability — as well as providing different learning options for each students' abilities and interests.
The focus has changed everything from what kinds of field trips kids go on to the variety of college-level and trade work opportunities they're exposed to.
Longworth says the shift has paid off — test scores are edging up, and the teacher retention rate was 93% last year.
Meanwhile, renovation work on the school started last fall. It's painstaking and the building has plenty of quirks — each window is a slightly different size, for instance, and replacements must be custom-made.
'It's time for it to come back to life'
Eric Brock is a third-generation Lockland resident who graduated from Lockland High School in 2006. Now he works for the district as a maintenance and facilities supervisor. He says back when he went to Lockland High, the school needed serious work.
On a brief tour, he points out the school's grand auditorium, complete with stained glass crests in its windows. There's the marble memorial to Lockland's World War II soldiers on the building's north side. And the third floor ready for drywall and the state-of-the-art tech that will transform it into the school's media center.
Brock is very excited for the renovation to finish.
"It feels good to see it," he says. "It was time for it to come back to life. Clearly that's what's happening."
Longworth echoes that.
"We've got one more year, then we move into the newly renovated building," he says. "That's when I think our renaissance truly begins."
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He acknowledges there will still be challenges. Longworth anticipates more than a third of Lockland's students will need English as a Second Language instruction due to immigration into the village from Central American and West African countries. And kids from generations-deep Lockland families won't have the same kinds of job opportunities their parents and grandparents had.
But the same school their families have been passing through for decades will have brand new classrooms — and a new focus on students' overall wellbeing, too.