Coming Home To Granville

By Sarah Thornborough

Early this summer, members of the Granville High School Class of 2008 walked across the stage in the Denison gymnasium and received their diplomas. It was a huge day for just over 150 students, all of whom will now embark on new futures and new lives. None of them are quite sure of what the next year will bring, and no one knows exactly how they will adjust. But during the flurry of exciting weeks as this year’s seniors left GHS forever, Granville’s class of 2007 was just returning home from their first year out on their own, I among them. We know what the year brought and how we adjusted.

During that year, we all embarked on our own paths, saw new things, and met new people, ultimately building the base for the rest of our lives. But how does Granville play into these new experiences that we created for ourselves? For eighteen years, Granville, the town, the community, the safety net, prepared us as best as it could for what was to come. Though very few of us still call our quaint little town “home,” Granville is not one of those places that you say goodbye to forever.

I know how I feel about Granville. To me, Granville is a safe-haven from the rest of the world. I can go out and do my own thing, but Granville will always be here waiting for me, to get me through anything that’s thrown my way. Though I may not always be in town, the town is always in me.

But I can’t just assume that my opinion reflects that of my entire graduating class. Some may never return to their hometown, others may be desperate to come back. Looking for an answer, I sent a survey to several of my Class of ‘07 peers about their past year and how Granville the town and school district played into their present and future.

In August of 2007, the first batch of us left for college, and couldn’t help but reminisce about Granville and the lives that we had led here. No overbearing parents, no close friends, no favorite places to escape to - in essence we had absolutely nothing to console us upon our arrival at college. Yes, eventually we’d all grow roots and make a family of our college friends, but there’s always that initial panic upon leaving the familiar.

Steven Bernini, now a rising sophomore at Beloit College in Wisconsin, also came to this realization: “We’re all afraid of what we don’t know, and I never knew life outside of Granville.”

But even though we all experienced a bit of fear of the unknown, there was still an excitement there. This was our chance to go out and make something of ourselves, all on our own.

Torey Dougan, now living in Dayton, felt this anticipation. “I was excited to get out of Granville because I wanted to just get out of the house and on my own a little bit and see what life was like without the parents and being on my own,” he says.

A student at the University of Montana, Kara Campbell agrees with this urgency to escape.

“I needed some place new to go explore,” she says.

Over the course of our first year, Granville High School had much influence over our academic performance in college. An overwhelming majority of people said that the high school’s writing department helped them not only pass but excel in any writing course or on a general academic paper.

Emily Matula, a student at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, says “My English skills were able to help me crank out 5-page papers like they were post-it notes.”

Not only were Granville students very well prepared for academic writing, but many noted how their new peers seemed to struggle with the kind of writing that we had been “trained” to produce in high school.

Bethany Thacker, who attends Mount Vernon Nazarene University, witnessed this in her classmates.

“I was amazed at the poor writing skills of other students attending MVNU,” she says. “Some could not even figure out how to properly write a thesis. So many struggled in the writing classes, while I found the assignments to be no different than what I had to write for high school.”

Also, many noted that Granville provided a solid general overview in other topics, and few struggled to adapt to the pace and workload demanded of them, but the strong writing program really stood out as the key to our successes.

Finally, now that we’ve completed Year One, most of us are home for the summer, and can’t help but have an altered view of Granville. Most of us seem to now appreciate what used to appear like a “boring” town. Granville may be small and it may be impossible to go to the supermarket without running into someone you know, but these qualities that could sometimes get annoying living here year-round have become much more endearing now that we can’t experience them whenever we please.

“Every person from Granville, at least I imagine, dreams of their escape for the greater portion of those 18 years, but as soon as we graduated I was kind of sad,” says Mary Kennedy, a student at the College of Wooster. “After being away for a year, I realized how much I missed high school and the routine and everything - the same people all the time and whatnot.”

Those “same people” make up a huge component of Granville’s charm. In a way, Granville feels like an isolated island in the middle of a cornfield - everyone knows everyone else, and our entire town seems to function as it always has, despite the constant changes in surrounding cities. The town is full of friends, neighbors, and acquaintances, and it seems that no one is mean-spirited or unkind.

Though Granville is a predominately Caucasian city, those of a different race are welcome too. One minority student in particular found the town’s general attitude toward minorities to be positive. Some in central Ohio may treat him with a lesser degree of tolerance than the typical white Granville citizen, but the students at Granville treated this student with the amount of respect that he deserves.

“The attitudes of Granville students were completely different from that of the people who lived in the area,” he says. “At the Granville schools, students would treat me just like they treat each other, without judging me based on my parents and my heritage.”

For this student, the harmony among people is just another reason to miss Granville.

Additionally, several people looked forward to visiting some of the small-town sights that make Granville what it is.

Leslie Gaber, a student at DePauw in Greencastle, Indiana, missed specific places, not just the town itself.

“I missed not only the people, but places like Brew’s and Whit’s, and just the friendly atmosphere,” she says.

“I discovered that Granville was a nicer place to grow up than I appreciated before,” says Aubrey Sitler, now a sophomore at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, “It’s beautiful, and I like how small it is. I missed that.”

I think it is very telling that so many of my peers answered my request. And these responses were not just quick yes/no answers - almost everyone gave me lengthy, reflective responses, many writing the equivalent of an essay. Not only does this prove the close connections between Granville students, even after a year of separation, but it also illustrates the allegiance to the Granville school system, and a willingness to offer advice in order to benefit future generations of Granville students.

During my first year at American University in Washington DC, I only returned home three times - Thanksgiving, Christmas, and a brief two days over spring break. And as I progress through my mandatory four years at American, odds are I will come back to Granville less and less, favoring the culture, sights, and unpredictability of the DC life. Despite the fact that I am making roots in a new area of the country, a new home, I, and it seems many of my high school classmates, will always feel a sense of calm knowing that Granville will be here waiting to ground me, no matter how my life proceeds.