"A new high school is a chance to bring together
various parts of the community, to give old-timers and newcomers
something in common to rally around." — Joseph Spicer
For nearly 50 years, Loudoun Valley High School
served Round Hill’s secondary-school population. Families and teachers
came to love the school’s "family atmosphere" and appreciated how the
faculty and students cared for each other.
However, as Joseph Spicer, a Round Hill resident who
taught at LVHS for 25 years, put it, the special atmosphere at Valley
was "difficult to maintain as the school grew bigger."
This fall, the opening of Woodgrove High School has
allowed Spicer and many other teachers and students from the Round Hill
area to regain some of that small-town community feel.
Spicer, who now teaches chemistry at Woodgrove, said
he is enjoying the "chance to go back to a smaller school where you can
know people on a personal level.
"It’s a move back to the past for me," he said.
Woodgrove journalism teacher Tammy Pyle agrees.
"Since it opened, Woodgrove has felt very much like a community school,"
she said. "That’s hard to get in some high schools, especially when
there is more than one school in town.
"But Round Hill and the other communities that make
up Woodgrove’s attendance district have embraced the school with such
enthusiasm that it feels like we’ve always been here," she said.
Woodgrove’s principal, Ric Gauriloff said that "the
support from the community has been fantastic." He noted that, even in
the tight economy, the local businesses have "reached out in their own
ways and given what they can" and that parent volunteering has been
"through the roof."
Gauriloff estimates that students from Round Hill
account for nearly 25 percent of the school’s 1,100 member population
and that approximately 15 members of his faculty call Round Hill home as
well.
Pyle, like Spicer, lives in Round Hill and is a
former LVHS teacher. She said that the decision to leave Valley was not
easy, but "the more I looked at the connections I have with students who
live in my community, the more committed I became to investing in the
community by being an educator in it.
"I believe it is invaluable to be a neighbor as well
as a teacher, to be able to remind a student to stay on track because ‘I
know your mother’ or recognize their faces from around the
neighborhood," she said.
Spicer, Pyle and Gauriloff all commended the students
at Woodgrove for embracing the new school and exceeding expectations.
Many of Woodgrove’s students spent part of their
school careers being shuffled between Blue Ridge Middle School, Harmony
Intermediate and Loudoun Valley, an overcrowded situation that Spicer
said "the kids handled with great spirit and understanding."
The opening of the new school has provided the
students with "so many wonderful opportunities that we might not have
had if we were all crammed into the crowded halls of Loudoun Valley High
and Harmony Intermediate," said Round Hill resident Casey Field.
Field, now a sophomore, served as a member of the
Woodgrove transition team, a group of students and staff members who met
monthly over the summer to discuss ways to make the new school feel like
home.
"We all wanted to share our thoughts and ideas for
what we had in mind for the new school," said Field. "Our goal was
simply to make Woodgrove the very best it could be."
Field said she and many of her classmates are "amazed
at the size and beauty of the new building" and that they are grateful
for "some of the smallest things," including new textbooks, large
lockers, the new school’s outdoor eating area and the classrooms with
views out to the Blue Ridge.
The students’ excitement for the new school "is
really almost palpable," Pyle said.
Spicer concurred, adding that this fall Woodgrove has
held some "exceptionally good pep rallies, some of the best I’ve ever
been around."
"I am amazed daily at how much these students are willing to invest
to make Woodgrove their own," Pyle added, "and to make it the best
school in the county."
