Advisor’s Note: “Then and Now” is a new idea for story submissions in Cardinal Nation. In the past we have shared stories from previous Mentor High School newspapers including The Mentor Log and Inkwell. Now, beyond just sharing those “blasts from the past,” we ask questions about what has changed, what has stayed the same, and what the future holds. In this story, Halo Ryan revisits a 60-year-old story from The Mentor Log about the state of – what was then – a relatively new building and compares it to our newly refurbished building today.

Then

Colorful Building Dazzles in Three-Dimensional View

September 9, 1965

“Are the yellow restrooms for Gentlemen?” The color coordination of the new Mentor High School is an important factor in the routine of students.

Each room is painted a bright and cheerful color-yellow, white or green. In each room there are multi – colored chairs and tiled floors. Chairs come in lovely decorator colors of aqua, cream, orange, gray or beige. Floor tiles are white with many speckles of beige and gray.

Sorry to disappoint you, Dad, but blackboards aren’t black-boards anymore. Mentor High chalkboards are chocolate-colored or mint-green. Note to teachers: yellow or aqua chalk would be very attractive on a brown board.

In the dining area and in the lecture rooms, checkered squares add a bit of glamor to the concrete block walls. These orange, aqua, and yellow squares also add coordination.

Although some of the classrooms do not have windows, the windows that are present have tinted glass. This is to ensure better study conditions by cutting the sun’s glare. Providing natural sunlight are skylights, located throughout the building.

The color of the new lockers also fits into the color scheme with beige, heather blue, and powder, blue. The lime-color helps to accentuate the packed – down gravel of the student and faculty parking lot.

And instead of the traditional green of most high school campuses, the new Mentor High School has a sentimental shade of amber brown – locally referred to as “mud.”

Now

Sixty Years Later: How Has Our Building Held Up?

October 1, 2025

That article was from the year 1965, the first year the current campus of Mentor High School was opened for use! Over the past sixty years of operation, the school has changed a lot. As some readers may know, the first high school building built in 1923 now belongs to Memorial Middle School.

The most notable change might be the colors of the building. There is significantly less yellow and green, for starters. Now, the walls of the rooms mostly have neutral colors like gray, white, and brown. The color coding has been largely minimized. But don’t worry; all forms of color haven’t been eliminated from the school! There are still a lot of colors in the chairs that dot the building. Judging by the photo, they are quite a bit more comfortable, too. The color lacking in the walls has been supplemented with plenty of colorful decorations in every teacher’s room. The teachers at Mentor have a lot of freedom to choose how their rooms look and are set out, with all sorts of posters, highlights, and furniture to be found around the school.

The floor of the school now has fewer of the same tiles. The white tiles have mostly been designated throughout the hallways. Meanwhile, the majority of the actual classrooms have different carpet floors for a more cozy and inviting style. They’re probably a bit harder to clean, though.

The chalkboards mentioned in 1965 are sadly no longer with us. They have since been replaced with dry-erase boards and new projectors to display a computer screen on the entire front of the room. There are also TVs in many rooms. These changes are certainly very helpful!

The windows are still similar to how they were in 1965, although most have now been replaced as part of a two-year project that added screens to them for the first time. A few rooms don’t have windows, but a large number of them do. Skylights are still present in the building, but there are more fluorescent lights and other ways of lighting things up. And, the locker colors have mostly been switched to gray. As for any lime mentioned, that’s been removed. Now, there are blue and red accents to make the building pop. There are also green trees and grass surrounding the campus.

The Mentor High School of 60 years ago had a few important features missing that we now might take for granted. One absence that most people remember would be the new renovations that took place last summer. Using the grants that were generously given, many new spaces were opened for use. Many of these were for the Career Academies program, consisting of eight paths designed to introduce and prepare students for careers they might choose to take after high school! There were also many renovations and improvements for other classes, such as the Programming and Software Development Academy and the Culinary Academy. Two more places that are now closely associated with Mentor High are the Fine Arts Center and the Paradigm. These didn’t exist when the high school building first opened! The Fine Arts Center was opened in 1993, and the Paradigm was opened in 2015.

It is very interesting to see how many of the little things that you might not pay attention to change over time. Over the years that it has been around, Mentor High School has changed a lot. There is plenty of history behind where we stand now, and all the different places we see every day.

Advisor’s Note: For more on the current state of the building, see this story about the most recent renovations.