September 14, 2012
School Changes My high school, Sauk Centre Senior High, has changed drastically since I first started there in the tenth grade, which would be three and a half years ago. The biggest change is physical and able to see, mainly affecting the outside of our school. To me the outdoor change is a great thing and I wish I was there to enjoy it, but there are changes that make me glad I am in college. The most drastic change to Sauk Centre Senior High comes in the form of our athletic complex. My senior year, which was in 2012, the athletic complex was a very brutal sight. We were the only school to not have a paved track. Our football field was not well maintained, even by a small school’s standards. The baseball field had a white shed behind home plate, making it impossible to see or make a play on the ball if you played third base, shortstop, leftfield, and sometimes even center field. But this past summer they started a six million dollar renovation project. That means brand new turf on the football field, new bleachers built in to the football field, state of the art track surface, leveled and reseeded infield on the baseball diamond, and a painted shed wall for the baseball players. I loved playing sports in high school, but seeing this happen to our school makes me slightly jealous. It makes me wish that I would have been one year younger, just to give me a chance to play on these brand new surfaces. The new sports complex drew a lot of positive feedback to our school; but some negative thoughts have come due to the combining of the senior high and the junior high, making it a secondary school. I had to endure this for my senior year of high school. Combining the schools made for a lot of problems. The first of these problems being that the number of kids at one lunch period grew drastically. Our high school had about three hundred kids in it, and they decided to have the seven through ninth grade eat at one time. Then the tenth through twelfth grade eat next. It caused for jam packed lunch rooms and sometimes kids not being able to eat because of long lines. Another reason it was a bad choice to combine schools is the kids in the senior high got treated like junior high kids. Sometimes it felt as if we actually went back in grades, instead of being treated like more mature students. When we combined schools, it meant we the school board had to decide which principle, the senior high or the