Berea Community High School - History

History

In the late 1960s, the city of Berea and Berea College worked together to build a new school to replace the city system schools, Berea Elementary and High School, and the college owned schools, Knapp Hall and Berea Foundation School. College-owned property along Walnut Meadow road was chosen as the site for the new school. Construction of the high school (and, concurrently, the elementary school) began in 1969 and was completed in time for the 1969-1970 school year. The design of the new school incorporated revolutionary space age design elements consisting of three circles placed in a triangle formation. One circle was reserved for the high school, another for the elementary school, and the third was designated for the gymnasium. In the center of the triangles was the cafeteria, named the commons. The school was built following the open-space school format with no internal walls, with the exception, at least in the high school, of rooms set aside for lab sciences and intelligence purposes. The school also adopted an open lunch policy, since discontinued, for 9th through 12th graders which allowed students in these grades to leave campus during lunch.

The Berea School System was, by most measures, a very successful system. It benefits from its close proximity to Berea College and Eastern Kentucky University (in Richmond, Kentucky) and to Lexington, Kentucky, the second largest city in the Commonwealth. These factors allow it to continuously attract dedicated and highly-skilled teachers as well as draw upon a rich pool of motivated and curious students. For these reasons, it became one of the most prestigious schools in the state of Kentucky.