Hampton High School officially opens addition, media center

This isn’t your grandmother’s school library. Or yours, even.

Hampton High School is hosting an open house from 6 to 7:30 p.m. Feb. 16 for community members to get a close look at the recently completed addition to the building, including a library media center in which you’re not going to be “shushed.”

“There’s soft seating in the library area for kids to be able to work together, to collaborate,” Principal Marguerite Imbarlina said. “We have rooms called ‘huddle rooms.’ It’s similar to what you might see at Google or an engineering college.”

Add plenty of lighting, natural and otherwise, plus a wide selection of books — yes, students still check them out — and the overall library environment meets the original vision of school officials.

“We started working on this in 2014, really thinking about how we wanted to redesign education for our students and create better spaces for them for learning,” Imbarlina said.

She spoke prior to joining three others Kai Suyama, senior class president; Jill Hamlin, school board president; and Michael Loughead, district superintendent — for a Feb. 9 ceremonial ribbon cutting for the addition, which also features a café area, studio, two new classrooms and a creativity-sparking Conceptual Thinking Lab.

The library space has been named the Gail V. Litwiler Media Center.

“Gail was a very, very dedicated school board member for 30 years,” Denise Balason, school board facilities chairperson, said. “With every decision she made, she took the interests of all the students to heart.

“One thing that she was really passionate about was libraries and how they could enhance students’ instruction, and she was very involved in the early discussions on how the traditional library would evolve into the media center that we have now.”

Balason presented Gail’s son, T.J. Litwiler, with a reproduction of the media center’s plaque.

Regarding the addition to the school, Imbarlina mentioned the project’s timing.

“I think one of the hardest parts about this project was that we did it over covid. And a lot of our design was through Zoom,” she said. “We weren’t able to see each other face to face, but we still made it happen. And I’m very proud of that work that we were able to accomplish, because it was probably one of the most difficult times in education for us to run a school and try to build at the same time.”

Faculty members had ample opportunity to provide input.

“Our teachers went through many meetings with our architects to design the perfect space for our students,” Imbarlina said, citing the school café, the Busy Bean, as an example.

“It is the way it is because our special education teachers, they knew we needed a better space to help our students learn career skills, and to help them understand how to create a space for them, where they could be more connected with our school culture and our school community.”