For Camden High grads, a sad farewell to the 'Castle on the Hill'

When Ja'Nayzia Morris thinks about Camden High School, she pictures the gothic tower that overlooks the city's Parkside neighborhood from atop flights of stone steps, and remembers the first day she climbed them.

"I was so excited because I got to go to the castle," she said.

Morris, the 19-year-old president of her class, is headed to Lincoln University this fall. As district officials plan to demolish Camden High and build a new school in its place, Morris dreads the thought of saying goodbye to her alma mater.

"It's devastating, sad," she said. "It felt like a family. When we come back from college to visit, is it going to be here?"

Morris was one of 202 seniors who descended the stairs in front of Camden High last week. Barring a dramatic shift in plans in the state-run school district, her class was the last ever to graduate from the building known as the "Castle on the Hill."

In the coming months, the stately edifice that welcomed its first students a century ago will be razed to make way for a $133 million modern facility that officials say will hold 1,200 students in four different "learning academies."

The announcement last year was welcomed by those who say the city's students have long deserved a better school, though many graduates acknowledge feeling sorrow at losing the historic structure.

"I'll miss the smell of it," said Arthur Barclay, a state assemblyman and former CHS basketball star who has coached students there for a decade. "I'll miss being inside. But I'm looking at the big picture."

Built in 1916, Camden High once held 2,400 students. Over the years the student body dwindled, and the infrastructure deteriorated. It is challenging to heat and cool, and the district has spent millions on repairs in recent years.

Barclay, a 2000 graduate, said that as a student he noticed the deficiencies in the building after he started traveling for games.

"We'd go to other schools, and they'd be nicer," he said. "The locker rooms were better. The showers worked."

The district first drafted plans to overhaul the building in 2007, which at the time included preserving the tower. But the plan never went before the Schools Development Authority (SDA), which is responsible for construction and renovation projects in the state's poorest districts, and in 2011 the Camden High project was shelved.

In 2014, Gov. Christie said the project was back on track, and last year district officials announced the demolition plans, saying the newest studies had found it would cost millions more to preserve and renovate the structure than to raze and rebuild.

During the estimated four years it will take to build the new school, most Camden High students will attend classes in the Cooper B. Hatch middle school building nearby.

Some have questioned why Camden High must be torn down, and a group of community residents has fought the plan from the beginning. The state's Historic Preservation Office is considering a request to add it to the historic register — a designation that, even if granted, would not guarantee that the building would be saved. The high school even emerged as a topic during this year's primary election, with some candidates for City Council and mayor pledging to stop the demolition.

Keith Benson, a Camden High teacher and president of the teachers' union, has been a vocal opponent, arguing that the goal in updating the school is to force gentrification of the surrounding neighborhood.

"It's a symbol of yesterday's Camden, but it's also a symbol of the greatness there is in Camden," he said. "Tearing down the most important symbol there is remaining of old Camden — it says a lot to people."

While changes in the neighborhood could lead to rising property values for homeowners, Benson fears low-income residents will be displaced and left with few options.

"When Camden High comes down, it will signal to people that the area is open to new people, that all the so-called bad stuff is leaving," he said.

Others have voiced fears that once the building is gone, the funding promised by the SDA will vanish, leaving no school at all where the High once stood.

Deputy Superintendent Katrina McCombs, a Camden High graduate, lived through a decade of waiting for the state to build a new public school in the city's Lanning Square neighborhood, where she had been principal of the neighborhood elementary school before its demolition. Eventually, officials turned the land over to the nonprofit charter operator KIPP, which built a charter-public hybrid "Renaissance" school on the site.

McCombs said the Camden High project has progressed faster and with better coordination than the Lanning Square plans, which were plagued with delays and lags. Superintendent Paymon Rouhanifard, hired by Christie, has been able to apply pressure on the state SDA, she said.

"We are so much further along in the process that I see it as a very different situation," she said.

A member of the Class of 1987, McCombs was captain of the cheerleading team. She has fond memories of eating lunch on the wall outside the school and spending long hours in the gym.

"I got to experience what it was like to be part of a winning team," she said. "We saw ourselves as winners, and we just loved our school. We were very insulated from the negative attention Camden got from media at the time."

She sees a different symbolism in the school's pending demolition.

"It's going to be dramatic to see it come down, and of course I get a little misty-eyed thinking about it," she said. "It's worth saying goodbye to. But this is a reminder to all of us that we can't go on as we have. That we need to build new futures for our children."

Officials have said they will preserve parts of the building's turrets as part of a sculpture garden planned at the nearby Camden County Historical Society.

Theodore Z. Davis graduated from CHS in 1951, went on to become a Superior Court judge, and briefly served as Camden's chief operating officer in 2007. When he attended Camden High, Davis said, the school was a gem in the midst of a beautiful neighborhood — albeit one that he could not live in because of his race.

"It was the Castle on the Hill," he said. "And it was our castle, so to speak. It became yours. You identified with it."

Even then, Davis said, CHS students enjoyed a rivalry with Woodrow Wilson High School. He made lifelong friends and he ran track, but gave little thought to pursuing college until a friend's parents urged him to apply to Temple University.

Over the years, Davis was saddened to watch the city lose residents and jobs, eventually falling into financial ruin that led to a state takeover.

But last week he said he was optimistic about the city's future, and believed a new Camden High building could encourage parents to keep their kids in district schools.

"I've been there since then, and it looked smaller," Davis said. "I still love the old school. I'll miss it, for sure."