By Cindy Kranz
The Cincinnati Enquirer

SHARONVILLE - Sharonville Elementary is more than just a building for longtime teacher Kelly Hilbert Flynn, so she often finds herself tearing up when she thinks about the school closing.

SCHOOL HISTORY

1840 - Hills Hall, the old town hall at Main and Walnut became the school. 1868 - New building was built on Sharon Avenue. 1898 - Larger brick building built just east of the old one. 1927 - Current building built on the former site of Chris Gruber's potato patch at Maple and Creek, becoming the Sharonville school district's high school and elementary. 1955 - Princeton School District was formed from several districts, including Sharonville. 1958 - Princeton High School was completed. Sharonville continued as an elementary school. 2004 - School closes and will be replaced with new building on same site. Source: Sharonville Elementary

"I kind of grew up here, because I came here right out of college," said Flynn, who has taught there 24 years.

Flynn remembers living a block away, yet driving to school because she didn't want to be known as "the old maid school teacher who walked to school."

Her husband proposed to her in front of the entire school after a Halloween parade. And, her fellow teachers and staff offered support when their son was born eight years ago with Down syndrome.

This fall, her school family will scatter to multiple buildings in the Princeton City School District. The shuffling is part of Princeton's $85 million building project to replace or renovate its eight elementary schools.

Most Sharonville students will move to the Robert E. Lucas Intermediate School for two years while the school is razed and replaced with a new building. Sharonville's preschool and kindergarten students will attend Evendale Elementary for the next two years.

Sharonville is now a K-6 building, but will be K-5 when students return in the fall 2006.

And so, a close-knit family of 58 teachers and staff must say goodbye after school's out June 3.

"It's very emotional," said Gary Tyler, who's been principal eight years. "When we first learned the news that various people were going to various places, the staff just sat down and cried. We're not going to be the same team. It's like when your oldest child goes off to college. You're never the same family once they're gone.

"Many of these people are lifelong friends. They go on vacations together. They sit for each other's kids. They do things for each other. ... They are family."

Sharonville Elementary, built in 1927, is the second-oldest building in the district and has been plagued by flooding. Its basement can no longer be used for classrooms.

It holds the distinction of being the Princeton building where the most students have been educated. When Sharonville was its own district, the building was a high school and grade school.

School enrollment is 323 students, but when the new building opens, there will be room for 420 - three sections of each grade.

"At one time, there were 900 folks here," Tyler said. "That's when we had 35-40 students in classrooms. It was packed."

Before the 1966addition, the school was so crowded at times that rooms were rented in churches, said Susan Wyder, fifth- and sixth-grade language arts teacher.

Wyder, who has taught at Sharonville for 23 years, will teach English next year at the middle school.

"This is not the way I would have written the end of the story," she said. "Very selfishly, I would have kept us all together for my last two years."

Jan Grage Beard, president-elect of the PTO, attended the school in the 1970s. Her two daughters are there now, and her son is in intermediate school.

Beard is nostalgic about losing the old building, but she also is excited about a new school. So are her girls.

"They are thrilled they'll have air conditioning throughout the building."