While looking back on the great tragedies of my life as of this present moment, the ones that make me question who I am as a person: What comes to mind for me is when my mom died, when I got diagnosed with epilepsy and most recently, in March of this year, when my beloved high school announced its abrupt ending after almost 60 years.
Now unfortunately for me this couldn’t have come via email; instead, this news spread like wildfire on Facebook. You see, I went to Bishop Grimes Senior and Junior High School, a smaller high school in greater Syracuse.
My graduating class was around 65 kids. And what felt even more like a cosmic joke then finding out that the place that I fell in love with learning was set to close was to find out while in the class that I hate most this semester.
I left class early to call my best friend, with whom I was inseparable during school at BG. I knew she probably didn’t know yet, so I decided to give her a call. Peyton and I — of all the relationships that I fostered at Grimes — we are so close that the moment I broke the news to her she started to cry.
When I told her I was going to write a story about the closing of our beloved high school and asked her if she had any quotes, she said: Of course “I had a lot of good and bad memories and oh, if those walls could talk. I laugh when I think about Grimes and the
memories and pictures of oh how young and dumb we were but forever thankful for the love and growth I have now for all the faculty staff and fellow Cobras.”
What is Bishop Grimes? Well it’s a Roman Catholic school and a part of the Diocese of Syracuse. All of the day-to-day operations go through the principal; however, everything else (meaning big decisions like closing) comes from the Diocese of Syracuse.
Many people in the community beyond my friend Peyton and myself had very strong opinions. I was even able to find an opinion piece posted to syracuse.com: Mike Basla, a former Air Force lieutenant general and maybe even more so important for the fact
that he was a part of the first graduating class from Grimes, wrote a whole article that was very interesting.
This quote was particularly telling: “Once again, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Syracuse leadership has made a poor decision by repeating mistakes of the past. The mistakes include a failure to collaborate with vested constituents, a complete lack of process transparency, and an apparent use of a faulty, almost nonexistent, decision matrix.”
To the points that Lieutenant General Basla made, the Diocese hasn’t been forthcoming at all with information about the merger, in my opinion.
There are a lot of questions left unanswered. But one thing that will always remain true is the sense of community that Bishop Grimes has always had. It has always felt like a family. That community tried to do everything to keep the school open, from change.org to a T -shirt drive, but hit those metrics you needed to know exactly what the diocese was looking for.
I will always remember to be curious. Remember to ask questions. To be a critical thinker. I’ll remember walking those hallways. That school felt like home because the staff and educators felt like family and from the bottom of my heart I can’t thank them enough.
Well, BG. I guess this is the end.
