I am sitting in a classroom in the Humanities wing off the main building of Lexington High School, proctoring the SAT. It’s 8:55 a.m. on a Saturday. There is no noise dampening, so I hear the nonstop roar of leaf blowers and lawn equipment outside. There is no air filtration barrier between the outside and inside of the building. While inhaling the deep, rich smell of freshly cut grass — which I’m unfortunately allergic to — I can feel my lungs fill with that sweet, toxic scent, the one that triggers the full-body itch that inevitably follows when my skin is exposed.
The classroom has an old, tan-colored radiator with a detaching front panel that hurls cold air nonstop into the room — the sound outcompetes the din of the machines outside. I can feel the blast of cold air even from ten feet away sitting at the teacher’s desk, as I watch twelve students take the SAT. I can’t help but wonder how much such an undesirable environment impacts their ability to fully grasp the reading passages and math problems on the computer screen.
It’s November 8, 2025. This classroom, built in 1953, is small, cold and damp. The ceiling is worn, covered with old, square, popcorn-style tiles. An old projector hangs from a metal support, looking like it hasn’t been used in decades, with odd metal attachments jutting from its frame. A wooden cabinet sits at the front of the room, one door askew, nearly falling off its hinges. Old laminated and metal bookshelves, filled to the brim with books stacked every which way, line the room. They look terribly sad.
I’m sitting at an old, laminated, metal desk with a few decorations: family photos the English teacher has placed here to add a touch of life and warmth. The chair I’m in is a faded green color with multiple water stains; one of the armrests looks like someone cratered it with a hammer. The students’ desks are metal, rickety and uneven, with hard plastic blue-and-metal chairs slotted into each opening. The walls, painted a dirty cream over cinder blocks, close in around the twenty-five or so desks crammed into the space. It’s oppressively depressing to sit in. The walls are covered with student-made posters, earnest attempts to bring color and meaning, and project a sense of learning and achievement into an otherwise joyless environment.
Outside this classroom, the hallways are narrow — too narrow for the nearly 2,400 students (not including the 100+ high school–aged students in the LABBB Educational Collaborative), 400-plus staff members, and visitors that traipse these halls throughout the school day. Far down the hall, there’s one small bathroom for females and another for males. The hallways are lined with long, tan, rickety lockers — mostly unused because they’re too far from where most students spend their days in this open-campus, five-building school. The main building connects to the Humanities wing, while the Science, Math, and World Language buildings stretch across the open campus.
There are only two lunchrooms in the main building, spanning the Worthen Road main entrance and the Waltham Street loading dock and parking area. Together, they hold fewer than 600 students at a very tight squeeze. With three short, 25-minute lunch periods, additional lunch tables are parked in the main hallways. Students are often seen sitting on the floor in hallways throughout the main and other buildings, eating their lunches — likely to stay close enough to their next class so they won’t be late. During lunch and passing time, the hallways overflow with a sea of students rapidly trying to navigate the sardine-can corridors to get where they need to be. Every space is filled.
On sunny, warmer days, the open courtyard — the quad — serves as overflow for students who need space to eat lunch or take a break. In inclement weather like this morning, many students find their way to the fieldhouse to eat. There is no breathing space going to class throughout the day. Passing time between classes is five minutes, with an added two minutes for late arrivals. My daughter has two classes every day that span from the second floor of the main building to the second floor of the World Language building, and a similar distance to the Math building — the two furthest from the main. That’s an eight-minute walk at a fast pace, or a seven-minute jog, to get to class on time.
Her AP Physics classroom is a windowless room in the Science building, where a fan circulates air throughout the day. Sections of the Math building have inconsistent heat, and the World Language building has insufficient heat and no air conditioning. Now that the temperature has dropped, many students bundle up in extra layers to ward off the cold and dampness as they move through the halls and sit through classes in these buildings. By contrast, in the main building, rooms like the music and band room can reach up to 95 degrees Fahrenheit in June — bad for both the instruments and the students. The performing arts teachers’ staff room is literally a closet. There are few staff rooms for teachers overall, and even fewer refrigerators and microwaves. The majority were recently removed to lower the high electric bill costs, making it difficult for staff to store food.
This is the current state of Lexington High School — an institution that has endured 72 years. Some residents believe that with a little cosmetic work and the construction of a 176,000-square-foot replacement for the World Language building — built while students are in class during the academic year — the current high school could continue to serve our community for decades, while students endure, because they say, “our high school students are resilient.”
It’s now 9:59 a.m., and the incessant noise outside still hasn’t stopped. It’s getting louder, more grating, while the radiator clangs and hisses in a dull, droning tune that all the students appear to have tuned out as they click to answer questions on their computer keyboards. I look at the windows — flip-out windows that require someone to climb onto the radiator or the narrow window sill to open and close. The shades are useless, frayed at the edges, letting light streak unevenly across the floor. I notice a cracked pipe next to a column near the window, its surface flaking, metal oxidizing. I wonder what the students see, what the teachers see every day — day in and day out — as they look around, inhale the smells, hear the sounds, feel the textures, and try to learn.