Playing detective to reveal mysterious rooms

The bell rings, and students pour out of the classrooms, heading for their next class. In the hallway, they pass by several rooms that are vaguely recognizable, but which they have no knowledge about.

Such rooms serve as a constant source of mystery. Students cannot help but wonder, What is in the teachers-only science hallway? What is that tiny room next to the math quad edged in the corner next to the staff bathroom? What is in the rooms behind the library’s front desk? Four Falcon reporters decided to do some stealthy detective work and find out for ourselves.

Library back rooms:

Every day, students go into the library to do their homework, look at the computers, check out books or just hang out with friends. However, they are largely unaware of the hidden back rooms of the library, blocked by the library’s front desk.

The room furthest to the left contains a bounty of periodicals, where the library’s magazine archive is stored. It feels otherworldly just looking at the floor-to-ceiling shelves packed with magazines, a few of which date back to the 1940s. Most of these periodicals are now available for access on the library’s online databases. The library, has nonetheless still decided to keep all the periodicals as some of the issues on the database only date back twenty years and has not found another use for the space.

There is a cabinet in the same room that contains all the school’s yearbooks, beginning from the 1960 book to the 2010 book. Students can only look at the yearbooks with special permission, since they are “absolutely irreplacable.”

“This yearbook has Steven Spielberg in it,” said librarian Kevin Heyman, picking up the 1965 yearbook. “If we lose it, it’s gone forever. [The yearbooks] are available, but we guard them pretty closely.”

Beyond the periodical room is a room full of books and a large table and then an audio and visual storage room.

Room next to 005:

Have you ever wondered what’s really in the many rooms labeled “office” scattered around campus? There are many, yet most of them seem virtually untouched.
With the assistance of maintenance worker Barton Fitzgerald, we looked behind the door of a small office next to room 005, next to the library and research room building.
The opened doors revealed a white, squeaky clean, tiny room. A single rectangular table had been placed in the middle, and was accompanied by a cushioned chair. A couple shelves were filled with what seemed to be textbooks. The room, used as an extra English office, is pristine, undisturbed by the rowdy teenagers.

Double doors in front of English teach Erick Rector’s room:

The double doors on the right revealed an untouched electrical room, which had been caked with layers upon layers of dust throughout the years. Although not the cleanest place, the room had a mysterious nature, similar to that of a newly discovered attic or secret passageway. The room controls the electrical aspect of the small building and also contains an air compressor, which can be used to fill tires on a van, or anything else that requires compressed air.

Room 902

Located in the music quad, room 902 is also one of the lesser known rooms on campus. It has a set of back doors, a set of double doors in the English wing next to the back parking lot. However, these doors cannot be opened from the outside. The room is used to build and store sets for plays and musicals and can be accessed from a door in the music quad, next to the robotics room. The scene shop looks like an ideal workspace. Much of the wall is painted with intriguing figures, like a ninja and a horse.

Wooden tables sit around the room, in the middle, and against the walls on top of a tiled floor. A wooden table in the middle of the room is partially smoothed over with metal, which is part of a table saw; such equipment is used for woodwork.