Worthington Kilbourne High School retirees reflect on school's first 30 years

After the last day of school May 25, 12 teachers at Worthington Kilbourne High School are retiring.

Kilbourne principal Aric Thomas said this is a high number of retirements to experience in one year and “is definitely not the norm.” This year’s retirees are education veterans at Kilbourne and in the school district, he said.

Six have been with Kilbourne since at least 2000, Thomas said, and a few have been with the school since – or in the years after Kilbourne opened its doors in the early 1990s – as well as several who were not at Kilbourne but were working in Worthington Schools during that time.

Kilbourne was opened at 1499 Hard Road in Columbus in 1991, following years of Worthington High School being the district's sole high school at Thomas Worthington High School’s current location, 300 W. Dublin Granville Road in Worthington. Kilbourne’s opening was a major success, Thomas said.

He said two of the major factors that drove the success of Kilbourne’s opening nearly 30 years ago were the school’s unusual setting and layout and an “energetic” staff ready to get going.

“You have a school built over a ravine and water moving through it, if you will,” said Thomas, Kilbourne’s sixth principal who has been at his position since 2017. “We have an open-floor concept in a sense but with traditional classrooms around it. But I think the building and the staff were a nice marriage.

“We’re a student-centric high school. We believe in family. We believe in closeness and collaboration, and our school lent itself to doing that.”

One of those energetic teachers was Ellen Clark, an intervention specialist at Kilbourne who started teaching in 1980 as an intervention specialist at Princeton Schools in Cincinnati.

Clark started at Kilbourne in 1995, only four years after the school was opened, she said. But she immediately picked up that the school community was fully engrossed in a culture its members had built from scratch only a few years ago.

“I think we’ve embraced being Wolves,” she said.

“Many of the teachers opening the building knew each other, and they’d already worked together (in the district),” said Holly Thompson, who has taught theater and English at Kilbourne since the school was opened. “It was kind of like a family that was all excited about moving into their new house.”

Thompson said the building was so new at the time, there were some talks of the school being referred to as “the shopping mall school,” particularly due to the commons area just down the hall from the main entrance.

“Just that big wall of windows that’s in that space, it’s opening and inviting,” Thompson said.

Vince Trombetti, who has taught physical science at Kilbourne since 1991, after seven years of teaching general 10th-grade science and biology at Groveport-Madison Schools, was the Kilbourne varsity football team’s first defensive coordinator. He took over as head coach from Jeff Gafford in 2006 and was succeeded by Mike Edwards as head coach in 2019.

As a coach for a new high school football team beginning from scratch, he said the coaching staff and players enjoyed building the culture and identity of the program from the ground up.

“That was kind of the fun part,” Trombetti said. “Coach Gafford had a tremendous set of ideas. And because we were brand new, we didn’t have any traditions.

“We made sure that we communicated to the kids, ‘Hey, we will establish traditions that we’ll carry forward here.’ It was a lot of fun.”

Trombetti recalled the time when the team’s “KFR” – Kilbourne football rules – phrase was coined by former Kilbourne running back and fullback Ryan Sprague.

He said it started when some players were hanging out together prior to the 1997 season.

“The kids were kind of hanging out together, and they were talking about how excited they were that the season was getting ready to start, and Ryan said, ‘KFR. Kilbourne football rules,'" Trombetti said. "And it stuck.”

Kilbourne went 10-0 in the regular season that year, Trombetti said, before the Wolves lost to Upper Arlington in the second round of the Division I playoffs after defeating Troy in the first round.

“When you have that kind of success, what kind of started off kind of as a joke ended up being serious business,” he said.

Trombetti said to this day, other Kilbourne athletes have adapted KFR to fit their own teams by swapping out the middle letter.

The culture Kilbourne began building in the early 1990s has continued to this day, and Tom Souder, who's retiring as the varsity boys basketball coach and Kilbourne's dean of students, said the Worthington community has played a major role in putting it together.

"This is a place that is a fairly good-sized community, but it has that small-town feel," he said. "The community rallies and has always rallied, especially at times of crisis. If somebody needs anything, somebody steps up."

While the school's culture has grown and developed, Clark said, teaching methods have changed. Technology has changed everything that they used to do in education the past 30 or so years, she said.

“I remember using a gradebook on a grid of paper where I kept track of grades,” she said.

Instead of using email, Clark recalled the times when teachers would go around the halls at the end of the day, putting notes and questions in each other’s mailboxes.

“(I’d leave notes saying) 'please share this grade with me’ or ‘do (the students) have missing assignments?’” Clark said. “Now I can get right on my computer and see immediately what’s missing and what needs to be done.

“We had very few computers in the building when it opened, and it’s been fun to see that grow and evolve and turn into what it is today.”

In addition to Clark, Thompson, Trombetti and Souder, this year’s Kilbourne High School retirees are Ronald Charlton, Rosa Marie Gerhardt, Tom Karns, Susan Lively, Nancy Smith, Dan Sparks, Nancy Stohs and Walt Reed, Thomas said.

Thomas said the school has filled 17 job vacancies as of late April. In addition to the 12 retirees, the school filled positions of staff who have resigned or moved, he said.

sborgna@thisweeknews.com

@ThisWeekSteve

This article originally appeared on ThisWeek: Worthington Kilbourne retirees reflect on school's first 30 years