The day Burlington High School opened to students at its temporary location in a former Macy’s department store, librarian Shannon Walters arrived at 6:30 a.m. She found the up escalator running in the wrong direction and super fast — like the “Tunnel of Terror” boat ride in Willy Wonka th e Chocolate Factory, she said. The escalator had been working properly when Walters left the building eight hours earlier, but now “it was whipping,” she said, “like 60 miles an hour — in reverse.” Getting to this day, March 4, 2021, had been difficult enough. A year earlier, BHS, like schools nationwide, had shifted to remote learning due to the coronavirus pandemic. That fall, the day before students were due to resume in-person classes at the New North End campus, the school was closed indefinitely due to elevated airborne levels of toxic polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) detected in one of its six buildings. The probable carcinogens soon were discovered in all buildings. Administrators scrambled to find an alternate home for the school and landed on the empty downtown department store, which they managed to renovate in just 10 weeks. Signs cautioning about PCBs at the old Burlington High School in 2021 Credit: File: Luke Awtry Then the escalator went haywire. The moving stairs, which initially seemed so novel in a school setting, turned out to be a persistent headache. “They tended to break down more than they tended to work,” said Lauren McBride, the first principal at Downtown BHS. But now, the yearslong saga of ups and downs — both literal and figurative — draws to a close. Final classes at Downtown BHS are on Monday, June 15. Construction of the new, $204 million school is nearly complete, and the Class of 2026, which never set foot in the old school, will be the first to receive diplomas in the new one. Graduation is on Tuesday, June 16. In a gymnasium big enough to accommodate three basketball courts, 222 teens will turn their tassels and step into adulthood in a ceremony that marks a transition for the city, as well. Burlington is wrapping up a long, tumultuous chapter. It began with the abrupt closure of the school, unspooled into weeks of uncertainty over the fate of its 57-year-old buildings and ratcheted into controversy over the decision to tear them all down based on state safety standards that are far stricter than federal ones. But in November 2022, voters overwhelmingly approved a $165 million bond to erect a new school on the same campus. While awaiting its completion, the town rallied around its unconventional high school to try to give its students the best possible experience that circumstances allowed. Downtown BHS doesn’t have a gym, so staff at the Greater Burlington YMCA let PE students use theirs, and the University of Vermont’s Patrick Gymnasium became home court for basketball games. Neighboring churches offered shelter in the event of a school evacuation. The Cathedral Church of St. Paul and Hunt Middle School’s auditorium hosted concerts and school plays. School assemblies convened at the Flynn; a teachers’ retreat, at Hotel Vermont. Senior Beck Fairbrother building boxes for the move to the new school Credit: Jeb Wallace-Brodeur Similarly, local merchants chipped in to help send students on a year-end trip to New York City and contributed gifts for Teacher Appreciation Week. Special education students learned how to order food at restaurants and buy merchandise in stores right outside the school’s front door. Businesses, too, benefited from having hundreds of students downtown. Backpack-toting customers became regulars at Burlington Bagel Bakery and Burlington Bay Market Café. “They’ve brought a great energy and vibrancy to the downtown,” Church Street Marketplace director Samantha McGinnis said, “and they’ll be missed.” Inside the windowless Downtown BHS, there have been compromises, of course. Eight switches controlled most of the lighting. Students watched movies with lights on because turning them off would have plunged several classrooms into darkness. Kitchen staff worked without dishwashers. Chemistry teacher Aaron Fogg needed two years to fully adjust his curriculum to include labs that could be conducted in the former men’s shoe department, which wasn’t equipped with fume hoods, sinks or the gas lines needed to operate Bunsen burners. And every staffer had to practice a lesson they learned in preschool: Take turns. “If somebody is heating their lunch in a microwave,” design and technology teacher Colby Skoglund explained, “then the copier doesn’t run.” “Pivot” became a “shudder word” for McBride, who oversaw the move into Downtown BHS and served as principal for the first two years before leaving for personal reasons. “If people never heard the word ‘pivot’ again, it would have been too soon,” she said. Noise and lack of windows presented the primary challenges. One student who felt claustrophobic in the space took advantage of a chance to study abroad her sophomore year, an opportunity she likely wouldn’t have seized if not for the building. Another family moved to Middlebury because their son suffered chronic migraines, which they expected to be triggered by the noise and fluorescent lights. Parent Adam Bluestein said the city let down its kids by moving them to “a windowless box.” International news coverage portrayed the school as “cute,” he said. “There was nothing cute about our kids going to school in a mall,” he countered. “It’s tragic.” His son, a 2024 graduate, never had a class in the old building; his daughter, Class of 2021, spent a few months downtown. Students made the best of it, Bluestein said, “but we shouldn’t have put them in that situation.” As difficult as the quarters were, they did not prompt an exodus. Families did leave because of the building — the school district doesn’t have numbers — but some kids from other districts exercised school choice to attend Downtown BHS. Largely, the kids are all right. Principal Sabrina Westdijk Credit: Jeb Wallace-Brodeur “Our students are still getting into prestigious universities,” principal Sabrina Westdijk said. “They’re winning national recognition in journalism and creative writing, for assessment scores. In athletics, we’re winning championships. All of the things that you would expect to see in a traditional building … we’re doing those things.” She credits the tenacity of staff and students: “It’s a traditional school that happens to live in a nontraditional building — and that’s because of the people in it.” They leave now with a great story and a slew of inadvertent life lessons in resiliency, camaraderie, adaptability and coping. Downtown BHS provided a five-plus-year-long teachable moment. “It’s cultivated this sense of We can do really hard things together,” Westdijk said, “because we’ve been tested and required to do really hard things together.” “For as wild of a ride as it was,” McBride said, “I would never change it for the world.” Between ‘The Pit’ and a Parking Garage Sophie Stadecker testing her balsa bridge at Downtown BHS Credit: Mary Ann Lickteig On a recent Thursday, design and technology teacher Skoglund stood in front of her Principles of Engineering I students, ready to outline the steps they would take to test the load-bearing capacity of the balsa-wood bridges they had built. It was morning, first block of the day. A sophomore was chewing. “Kaz, how’s breakfast?” Skoglund asked. “Um, it’s good,” Kaz Skalka replied. “Gooood,” Skoglund said. Then she addressed the class. “So, just a quick reminder,” she began in what can only be described as Classic Teacher Voice: very precise, very loud. “If you missed the memo on Tuesday, we flip-flopped the days due to weather. So, tomorrow is the day that we are launching … rockets. Today, we are testing your bridges. There are several things that need to get done when we test our bridges.” She paused. “Gentlemen, are you with me?” A sheepish “yes” followed. “Excellent.” It could have been 1956, 1986 or 2026, in any high school in any town. But this was in a Macy’s. Logos for Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein and Michael Kors remained on the walls. Randy Burnett, who managed the $3.5 million renovation on behalf of Colin P. Lindberg, Architect, still marvels at the transformation. Asked to recall the challenge he and his colleagues faced turning an empty department store into a school, he laughed. “No challenge at all!” he said. Then he laughed some more. The building, empty since 2018, was a shell with a few mannequins inside when they started. Honestly, Burnett said, wrapping his head around “the significant factors of the change of use” felt daunting. “And we kind of just took it one challenge at a time.” Step one: Meet with the city’s building inspector and fire marshal to find out whether the building was safe and structurally suitable. The store, once the anchor of Burlington Town Center, was constructed in the late 1990s and cleared those hurdles. Then the race was on. In addition to BHS, the campus housed Burlington Technical Center, which serves students from schools around the region. In all, some 1,100 kids attended school there. Getting them back into classrooms was the top priority. Once permits were issued, construction began even before designs were finished. The high school would move from a 250,000-square-foot facility into a 150,000-square-foot building shoehorned between the lot where the mall once stood — nicknamed “the Pit” — and a five-story parking garage. Senior Jane Laramee in the Downtown BHS library Credit: Jeb Wallace-Brodeur By eliminating the gym and auditorium, shrinking the library and cafeteria, and moving Burlington Technical Center programs elsewhere around the city, the school could fit — in an arrangement a Realtor would call “cozy.” The biggest challenges were lack of daylight and finding a way to create traditional classrooms in a building designed with an open floor plan, Burnett said. Installing windows would have required significant engineering and structural support, costing time and money. Creating classrooms with four walls that touched the ceiling would have disrupted the sprinkler and ventilation systems, so the newly erected walls — all of them, at first — stopped short. Architects wanted to get kids into the building to see how it worked. They would spend the summer retrofitting. The first students through the doors — the classes of 2021 through 2024 — were guinea pigs who dubbed themselves “the mall rats.” Fittingly enough, their school, filled with white, blank hallway walls and doorless classrooms, looked like a maze. “I remember getting lost pretty much every time I was trying to get to class because all the hallways looked the same,” said Zoe Boray, who graduated in 2021. The predominantly fluorescent lighting gave people headaches, so staffers disabled some of the ceiling fixtures and brought in lamps. But there was no way to add natural light. “It was like walking into a casino,” chemistry teacher Fogg said. “There was one time, freshman year, when it was the end of the day and I was sitting in my class and I heard this weird sound on the roof,” senior Lily McArthur said. “And I realized it was pouring down rain.” It had been sunny when she walked into school that morning, she said, “so I was so confused.” In an attempt to connect students to the outdoors, Walters live streamed views of Lake Champlain and the Church Street Marketplace on two monitors the kids could see while passing the library. Special education teacher Meg Willis, who used to create window displays in New York, covered walls with artificial turf and attached faux succulents and ivy. School psychologist David Fitzpatrick brought in a sunlight therapy lamp. And the school installed picnic tables and flower boxes on the top level of the parking garage to create a “rooftop garden.” Rooftop garden at the downtown parking garage Credit: Jeb Wallace-Brodeur Inside, noise pinballed around the building. Architects raised walls where they could and added acoustic panels and classroom doors. Teachers brought in tapestries. But sound would not be contained. “We all know what we will hear at the band concert,” Westdijk said, “because we’ve all been listening to rehearsals.” To add to the cacophony, two 11-story buildings were rising from “the Pit.” Sometimes the work shook the whole school, Fogg said: “I lost glassware.” As they describe their school, the denizens of Downtown BHS mimic sounds as though they’re little kids playing with trucks. Construction equipment next door, just yards from junior Eva Schwartz’s AP U.S. History room, blasted “doot, doot, doot, doot, doot — like, so, so loud,” she said. The stapler tacking notices to the bulletin board on the other side of counselor Karen Prouty’s office wall went tchick-tchick, tchick-tchick, tchick-tchick. Frozen strawberries hitting a metal tray in the kitchen, a few yards from Josepha Austin’s special education classroom, sounded like gunfire, she said: “rata tat tat.” And the escalator! Austin’s long, rectangular classroom had a door at each end: one next to the cafeteria, the other right across from the bottom of the up escalator, which continued to run long after the down escalator had given up. But something underneath was broken, and it made a sound every 53 seconds. “It was a hideous metal screech,” Austin said, that measured 90 decibels — as loud as “standing next to a lawn mower.” Some people are sensitive to constant noise, counselor Prouty said. Escalator maintenance proved challenging because the repair crews had to come from Massachusetts; the screeching went on for more than a year. This year, school officials conceded defeat, switched off the irksome up escalator and allowed both to function as stairs. Still, Prouty said, “if you stand by it for long enough, you will hear beeping, beeping, beeping, beeping. And so that, too, is now a constant.” The Ups and Downs Sophomore Amaris Molina by the escalators at Downtown BHS Credit: Jeb Wallace-Brodeur Pictures of students gliding up and down to class in the early days of Downtown BHS were seen around the world. Journalists love a quirky story. The Associated Press sent this one internationally with the tags “Education, Calvin Klein, Michael Kors, Oddities.” The BBC World Service posted its video account online and generated nearly 400 comments on the Vermont mall school. “That’s not so unusual,” one commenter sniffed, “they act like they’re the only people to ever have done that.” Indeed, remodeling, flooding, fires and tornados are among the forces that send schools searching for temporary quarters. Other school districts reconfigure nontraditional spaces to stay for good. Montgomery Ward, Sears, Lord Taylor, and Best Buy stores have all accommodated classrooms. BHS didn’t land in a swanky Saks Fifth Avenue, but it could have been worse. “It would suck to graduate from an ex-Kmart,” one Reddit user posted above a photo of an Illinois high school located in one. Squatters had moved into the abandoned discount store in the Chicago suburb of Waukegan before Cristo Rey St. Martin College Prep saw its potential and selected it as a permanent home. The transformation from blue-light specials to natural-light-filled high school won a Landmarks Illinois preservation award. Temporary quarters — due to their make-do nature — prove the most challenging. After a deadly tornado flattened large swaths of Joplin, Mo., in 2011, the city’s 11th and 12th graders landed in a former Shopko at Northpark Mall, where, like at Downtown BHS, noise was an issue. “We joke that we have dual-credit classes,” English teacher Virginia Gormely told NPR. The personal finance teacher next door to her classroom was unusually loud, Gormely explained: “There are many times when my kids actually answer the questions that he’s asking his class.” Even fictitious Abbott Elementary moved into a mall in its latest television season. Showrunners for the ABC sitcom told entertainment news website Deadline that the storyline was inspired by California’s Palisades Charter High School’s relocation to an empty Sears building after a wildfire destroyed much of its campus early last year. BHS administrators considered other options for a temporary school: the former South Burlington Hannaford store that’s now a Tesla dealership, space at GlobalFoundries in Essex Junction, and erecting trailers on school property. “Macy’s was the clear front-runner,” school district communications specialist Russ Elek said. So Jill Kelley taught English in a room where she used to buy bed linens. Books lined the well-lit shelves where fine china was once displayed, and pale green satin wallpaper adorned the library office, once the lingerie department. Macy’s Day Parade in 2022 Credit: Courtesy of Colby Skoglund Like sitcom writers, BHS staff and students played into the novelty of their circumstances. Every November, just before Thanksgiving break, seniors staged the Macy’s Day Parade. Floats constructed on carts moved through the halls along with the marching band, and students threw candy. At cross-country meets, BHS runners cheered each other on with the chant: “M-A-C-Y-S. PCBs at BHS. Let’s go (clap, clap) Macy’s! (Clap clap.)” On the “Everything is normal when…” list in the 2023 yearbook: “You can literally smell the perfume in the school that they used to sell in Macy’s.” The location was a curiosity, but it caused some students to struggle. “This building is soul-sucking for me,” sophomore Jillian Stucker said. “I need sunshine. I need the outdoors.” Nadya Bech-Conger’s family moved to Middlebury because of the building. Her son, Matias Citarella, suffered chronic migraines, the result of a severe concussion years earlier, followed by a second. “My heart broke when we left,” she said. The family had moved from Charlotte to Burlington so the kids could go to Burlington schools. Bech-Conger taught humanities at BHS for 10 years before taking other jobs within the district. But Matias, now 18, had missed lots of school between fourth and eighth grade, his mother said. If he attended Downtown BHS, the acoustics and fluorescent lights surely would have triggered his headaches, she said, “and it felt like a chance we couldn’t really take, given what he had been through.” Matias graduated from Middlebury Union High School on Saturday. The old department store made Luis Vivanco’s daughter Camila feel claustrophobic and anxious about escaping in the event of a school shooting, he said, asking: How can a school have a proper lockdown if its classroom walls aren’t connected to the ceiling? So Camila took advantage of an opportunity to spend her sophomore year in Denmark. Vivanco and his family love BHS, he stressed, and actually prefer having it downtown, but the unconventional building nudged his daughter to go abroad. “I don’t think it would have happened otherwise,” he said. She returned this year for her junior year. She hasn’t complained as much, her dad said, but she “can’t wait to get out of there.” A game of hacky sack at Downtown BHS Credit: Jeb Wallace-Brodeur Special educator Austin teaches students with intensive special needs, some of whom are “incredibly sensitive” to sounds, she said. Her classroom, just steps from the cafeteria, the escalator and the entrance to the parking garage, was located in one of the school’s most heavily trafficked areas. Students unable to use words exhibited signs of stress, she said: “One student did a lot of vocalization, letting people know it wasn’t working.” The addition of acoustic panels and the extension of all walls to the ceiling helped tremendously, Austin said: “It ended up being a great room.” It’s a large space with high ceilings. Other students dropped in to sit on couches and beanbags during their lunch periods. Teachers streamed in on Wednesday mornings when Austin’s students sold coffee and pastries in the room’s Seahorse Café. In the old BHS, special education classrooms were in far-flung buildings, largely isolating kids with special needs from the rest of the student body. “In this situation, they’re front and center,” Austin said. “A lot of kids met them who maybe never would have met them.” Street Wise Twenty-two-year-old alum Zoe Boray, who got lost in the hallways that first spring, returned last fall to make a short film about the school for her documentary class at Hofstra University. “The place had changed so much,” she said. Colorful art covered hallway walls. Finding the way was easier, Boray said, “because it actually looks like a school.” Her film, “M@cy’s High,” premiered in April at Burlington’s Made Here Film Festival, where it won the Audience Favorite award. The downtown years for BHS straddle film genres: comedy, drama and, some would say, horror. Moving from a secluded lakeside campus to an urban center required adjustments from both the city and the school. Some students were able to walk to the new location. Getting to sports practice, however, often required hiking to the Edmunds Middle School gym or getting a ride to the old campus, two miles away, where the school continued to use athletic fields. Senior Esther Lokossou, who had attended high school games when she was a child, said there were noticeably fewer student spectators in recent years because it was harder for kids to get to athletic events. Downtown BHS sits across the street from a busy bus station, criminal court, and a probation and parole office in a city plagued by homelessness and drug addiction. Students on their way to school encountered people shooting up and sleeping on the street. On one or two occasions, a naked man roamed the parking garage. Yet when asked about their favorite part of their unconventional high school experience, students said it was being downtown. Juniors and seniors were allowed to leave the building when they didn’t have class, and they enjoyed walking the two and a half blocks to the Church Street Marketplace for lunch. A short jaunt in the other direction took them to Burlington Bay, where they ordered French fries and creemees — “together,” co-owner Al Gobeille said. “I was like, What?!” He’s going to miss having the students so close, he said. “I don’t have a negative story. All the kids were great.” The temporary neighborhood came to feel like home, principal Westdijk said. “It feels like we’re just part of the fabric of the community downtown in a really lovely way. And it’s not a small thing to take on a campus of over 1,000 people — 900 students that flow in and flow out at set times and can snarl traffic.” The school has scheduled a thank-you-and-farewell parade for 10 a.m. on Monday, June 15. Sparkly navy pom-poms will shimmer as students and staff march from the school, down Church Street and to City Hall Park for a short program before parading back to conclude their final day at the old Macy’s. Westdijk aims to have the school moved out by the end of the month. The building will sit empty for now, its fate unclear. Redevelopment will likely occur around 2030, said Don Sinex, majority owner and manager of Devonwood Cherry Street Associates, the company that owns the site. Planning hasn’t started yet. Covered parking may be the only thing BHS staffers miss after the move. Light floods the new 256,000-square-foot school. Three classrooms on the east end have entire walls made of windows. An interior courtyard provides a place to meet for class or dine al fresco. A second-floor balcony overlooks the athletic fields. Gallery: The New BHS The new school has a 750-seat auditorium, a 150-seat black box theater, a dance and yoga studio, and indoor bike parking. Multi-thousand-dollar acoustic ceilings in the band and chorus rooms mean that students in the classrooms above will have to attend concerts to hear the music. For all its shortcomings, Downtown BHS fostered a sense of community among students and staff because everyone crossed paths around the escalators. They dubbed the area “the Fishbowl.” At the old BHS, staffers, especially, didn’t have many reasons to leave their buildings. “There were stories that the music teacher would never meet the science teacher,” Elek said. Downtown, two people might cross paths six times a day. They didn’t want to lose that communal feeling, so, just inside the new school’s front doors, designers incorporated an expansive, airy, skylit common area that doubles as the cafeteria. A decorative mobile — constructed with sound-absorbing material — dangles in the center. Teacher Kevin Cross has suggested that administrators incorporate one other aspect of Downtown BHS. In an email he sent to fellow staffers, he attached a recording he made of the escalator’s horrible metallic screech. As the 2025-26 BHS Teacher of the Year, he wrote, he ought to be granted a wish, and he would wish for the school to replace its traditional passing bell with the screech — “reminding us every day of how we survived 5 years in this place.” He added a postscript, just for Austin: “we can just put this on a 53 second loop outside your room.” ➆ Burlington High School Thank You Farewell Parade, Monday, June 15, 10 a.m., on Church Street between Cherry and Main streets. Burlington High School/Burlington Technical Center Grand Opening and Block Party, Saturday, August 22. Weekend tours throughout the summer. Learn more at bhs.bsdvt.org. The original print version of this article was headlined “Everything Must Go | After five unconventional years, Burlington High School prepares to check out of the old Macy’s and move into shiny new digs” Our reporting on the evolution of Burlington High School, 2020-25 The post Burlington High School Prepares to Move Out of the Old Macy’s appeared first on Seven Days. ...read more read less