Silver Lake Regional High School - History

History

Named for Silver Lake, which borders the four Silver Lake towns for most of the district's history – Plympton, Halifax, Pembroke and Kingston - Silver Lake Regional High School opened on September 19, 1955, attended by students from the towns of Pembroke, Kingston, Plympton, Halifax and Carver in southeastern Massachusetts. The school was constructed for $1.7 million dollars, and originally housed grades 7–12. Over ten thousand spectators attended the dedication, which was keynoted by Senator Leverett Saltonstall. The original graduating class was 81 students.

Beginning with the 1959 school year, Carver left the district, and its students began attending Middleboro High School, before joining the Plymouth-Carver regional school district in 1963. In 1958, the seventh and eighth grades were split off into the former Kingston High School building (which stood behind the current Kingston Police Department headquarters), which became the first Silver Lake Junior High. In 1968, the region built a new junior high school building on Route 27 in Pembroke.

After the completion of Route 3 in 1962, the Silver Lake towns – as did the South Shore generally - experienced explosive population growth, well into the 1980s. The Silver Lake campus eventually grew too small for the growing populations of the towns – their combined population nearly trebled between the founding of the district and 1970 – and by 1970, the high school was on split sessions, becoming double sessions by 1974.

In 1974 Silver lake began construction on the Silver Lake-Pembroke Campus on Learning Lane in Pembroke. Construction would take two years at a cost of $3.7 million (which was funded by Pembroke residents). At the same time the original Silver Lake-Kingston campus underwent a major addition which would add a second gymnasium, new class rooms and a completely new vocational wing. Silver Lake–Pembroke was scheduled to open in September 1976, but was delayed until November 1976 due to vandalism and a fire during the summer of 1976. The fire caused the new sprinkler system to flood the lower level of a nearly complete school. Carpeting and sheetrock had to be replaced and repainted. The school eventually housed grades 9–12 of Pembroke residents, while Kingston, Halifax and Plympton residents continued to attend at the original building.

Silver Lake graduated its largest class, of 510 students, in 1981. Attendance peaked in 1980, when enrollment in the high school was 2100 students with just over 1000 students at the junior high. Subsequently, and throughout the 1980s, enrollment declined. In 1993 the region closed the junior high building, and converted the Pembroke campus to the junior high and the Kingston campus, once again became the sole high school campus housing students from Kingston, Pembroke, Halifax and Plympton as it had prior to 1976. Attendance dropped from 2100 in 1980 to 1260 in 1993.

Continued overcrowding in the school led Pembroke (with a population by 2000 half again what it was in 1970) to withdraw from the district and form its own independent school district in 2002; its students were still enrolled in Silver Lake until 2004.

Because of overcrowding and an outdated school a new high school was constructed on the site of the original building, which opened in 2004. The school is one of the most expensive standing in Massachusetts and is right next to the new Silver Lake Middle School.

The 1955 high school building stood until 2005 when it was torn down; however, the original football field, Sirrico Field, remains.

The school was cited in Boston magazine as being one of the 2008 fifty top schools in eastern Massachusetts .