by Stephanie Petrovick and Reginalynn Fontanilla
Soon, the building of St. Michael’s School is going to be demolished. After months of debate by the Hudson Planning Board, the building will be destroyed and replaced with a Rite Aid as well as another bank. Now the demolition company is closing the deal for the land with St. Michael’s Parish, and once the land has been bought the demolition will start.
Although the building will be gone, graduates and former teachers will not need the building to remember the great friendships and experiences that they had there.
History teacher Lonnie Quirion graduated in 1966 from Hudson Catholic High School, and after he graduated college he worked as a teacher there for 8 years. Quirion was also a coach for the school’s baseball team. He remembers when the school closed. “ I was coaching baseball there at the time, and my baseball team was the last team that was still playing, so even after the school had finished my team was still in the playoffs.”
After the school closed, many struggled to plan what they were going to do now. “The kids who were going to be seniors, they were running around trying to figure out where they were going to spend their senior year in high school. I’m sure you can imagine what that would be like, going into senior year and not knowing,” he said.
Despite his sadness over the school’s closure, Quirion treasures the relationships that he made there. “Some of the people I worked with when I first started teaching, they were really mentors to me to become the teacher that I am now,” he said. “They can tear the building down, that’s fine, but it’s the people that I really remember.”
School psychologist Debbie Lazaros, a graduate of St. Michael’s, also remembers the relationships she formed there. “I think a favorite memory would be the comradery that it made for us,”she said. “We accepted each other, and there wasn’t so much of this unacceptance that you hear about in high school or middle school or even elementary school these days.” Hudson Catholic had at most 100 kids, which is very small compared to Hudson High. “Looking back at the 18 kids in my class in St. Michaels, we were all very very different and probably have nothing in common. But there were so few of us that we all interacted together because that was all that we had, so we accepted each other for our differences and similarities.”
Of course, St. Michael’s was not the first school to be closed in that building. The building was originally for the Hudson Catholic High School, or HCHS, which was founded in 1959. When HCHS closed in 2009, the St. Michael’s elementary school was moved into the empty building. Then, two years later, St. Michael’s closed, and now after another two years the building is going to be destroyed.
The building is going to be torn down once the lot is bought from the St. Michael’s parish, and the demolition is expected to take nine to ten months. Currently the crews are finishing asbestos removal while waiting for the land to be bought.
“I think it’s really true what they say. When one door closes, another door opens, and you have to make the best of it. You can’t be disgruntled and angry. You have to let go and forgive and move on,” said Sue Drummey, who went to Hudson Catholic and whose children all went to St. Michael’s.
To see people who went to St. Michael’s and learn more information, click the links below.
