By Cindy Kranz
The Cincinnati Enquirer

Open classrooms seemed like such a cool idea in the 1970s. But like disco music and leisure suits, the fad has fallen out of favor.

Mariemont and Sycamore high schools are among the latest in the Tristate to close up their classrooms with walls. Mariemont City School District held an open house Sunday to show off a new addition and renovations at the high school, which included transforming the building into a traditional school setting.

Open classrooms came into vogue in the late 1960s and ran rampant in the 1970s. Noise, technology needs and security concerns have all contributed to their demise in many schools.

Mariemont High School was built with open classrooms about 1971.

"It was state-of-the-art at that time," said James Renner, Mariemont High School principal. "We had people coming from around the world to see how education was going to be in the 21st century. It proved not to be the case, at least in secondary education."

Open classrooms were established to provide for flexibility in scheduling, team teaching and active learning. But schools soon began putting up partitions and bookcases to divide space.

"As we quickly found out, it was just not conducive to an academic learning environment," Mr. Renner said. "It was just tougher for high school kids to deal with ... I think they forgot to take into account the distractibility.."

And so, after 22 years teaching in the same room, Mariemont math teacher Debbie Keefe finally has walls and windows. When she started, the five classrooms in her pod were open. Eight-foot barriers later went up, but didn't help the noise level much.

"You could hear everything," she said. "Next door, if they were talking about algebra properties and you were giving a test on algebra properties ... It happened more than once, believe me."

Students appreciate the change. If they're using the weight room, they don't have to hear the roar of power saws in the industrial arts class on the other side of the partition.

"I myself didn't really feel like I was going to school," said Matt Hagerty, 17, a Mariemont senior. "It did make it hard to concentrate, especially when other classes watched movies. It made it confusing to get to places, especially for freshmen. Now, with all the changes, it took away all those problems."

Security concern

It was also time for a change at Sycamore High School, built with open classrooms in 1974. Noise aside, Chuck Mason, Sycamore's assistant superintendent, sees security as the No. 1 reason for converting to a traditional setting.

He became a high school principal in 1999, the same year as the shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado. That incident forced schools nationwide to re-examine security and practice lockdown drills. With open classrooms at Sycamore, there was nothing to lock.

"Anybody that got into that building could go anywhere," Mr. Mason said. "This gives us the ability to lock down classrooms and keep the kids and staff safe if something terrible would happen."

Wyoming High School built walls around classrooms about four years ago. The school was built with open classrooms in the mid-1960s.

"For those of us who remember new math - like new math, I think, it was a good idea gone bad," said principal Ken Baker. "It does create a sense of community and awareness. Those were probably the prominent things in the 1960s. Let's all be together - kind of a commune type of thing."

New education models

Technology also led to the demise of the open classroom, said Mike Flick, associate professor of education at Xavier University. Besides the distraction if one teacher was using technology, for example, openness also posed problems in wiring.

"Ohio wants lots of computers in classrooms for student availability," Dr. Flick said. "If you don't have any walls, you're going to have some kind of conduits running where people can trip over them."

Open classrooms weren't just about space, but also a way of teaching and learning, said Valerie Bang-Jensen, assistant professor of education at St. Michael's College in Burlington, Vt.

The open classroom allows children to be more active learners through projects and discussions, with teachers playing the role of coach. But this type of education can be accomplished in a regular classroom, Dr. Bang-Jensen said.

Now with the standardized-assessment push that's driving instruction, teachers and administrators feel pressure to view curriculum as separate compartments, Dr. Bang-Jensen said.

Not all schools are quick to change, though.

Ursuline Academy in Blue Ash still has open classrooms, which have come to define the all-girls school, built in 1970.

"I think the open classroom is really a piece of who we are as Ursuline Academy," said Sister Patricia Homan, assistant principal for Spirit and Mission Development.

An open classroom, along with modular scheduling, helps students take responsibility for their own education.

"What it teaches our students is to focus on what's happening for them and to block out all the background noise," she said. "Our graduates have told us that when they go away to college, that really helps them because when they're in dorm rooms trying to study, they have the ability to block out what they're not focused on."

E-mail ckranz@enquirer.com