“Red mud, everywhere. The summer that East was built, it rained just all the time, for some reason.”
Former counselor Katy Lipkus still remembers the way red mud defined the opening of East Chapel Hill High School, even forcing early visitors to the school to wear boots to avoid ruining their clothes.
“They just barely got the school constructed,” said chorus teacher Desiree Davis-Omburo, who has taught at East since it opened. “So it was really muddy. It took them a while to landscape. So of course, you have a new school so you don’t want to be tracking in mud, so I remember that was a problem.”
But the appearance of Freshman Hill wasn’t the only thing different between present day and the morning of August 20, 1996. The school that students walked into that day had just two quads (A and B) and no band room, chorus room, or auditorium. As Lipkus explained, the stairs that now lead up to the Wildcat “just ended.”
The students themselves were relatively few in number. Rising seniors stayed at Chapel Hill High, and juniors were given a choice of whether to come to East or not. That left the new high school with essentially two and a half classes of students, but simultaneously provided an opportunity for growth.
“It was just so interesting to watch kids build their place, and their traditions,” Lipkus said. “That doesn’t happen often. There are very few new high schools built because they’re so expensive. So to watch that from the ground up was truly a privilege.”
Lipkus helped oversee much of the practical organizing required to open East, from moving teachers’ classroom belongings to their new rooms at East, to applying for a flag that had been flown over the Capitol building and securing a school SAT number.
“There was lots of stuff that with a new school you have to do that you don’t think about,” Lipkus said.
By the standards of social studies teacher Dominic Koplar (who was a freshman in East’s inaugural school year), the school building seemed extremely large, especially for that time. However, he wasn’t alone in feeling overwhelmed.
“Everybody was brand new, so no one knew how to get around the school,” he said. “There was no ‘Ooh! The upperclassmen this or the upperclassmen that’ because everybody was one day in, two days in, three days in.”
Wildcat athletics got underway immediately as well (the new student body had voted on the mascot name), and the first winter of East’s existence had the school captivated by the shocking success of the boys’ basketball team. Led by star freshman Chris Hobbs—who would go on to play at Clemson University as well as professionally overseas—the senior-less Wildcat team went on a remarkable run through the 3A state playoffs, all the way to the state championship game, which was played less than six miles away from East at the Dean E. Smith Center on March 22, 1997.
“Probably 90 percent of the student body attended that game,” Koplar said. “I could tell you exactly where I was sitting. There was a lot of excitement about it. I think East is still a pretty tight knit community, but with probably half the kids—just a freshman, sophomore, and half a junior class—it was an even more tight knit community. The guys on the team, everybody either had a class with them or knew them or was pretty friendly with them, and so everybody was pulling for their success.”
Trailing by two points on the game’s final possession, the Wildcats’ Andy Jones drained a contested, pull-up three pointer from the left wing at the buzzer to lift the Wildcats over Hickory High, 60-59, and make East the first team in North Carolina history to win a state title in its first year as a program. The victory reverberated throughout the school.
“I think it was immeasurable in terms of pride,” Lipkus said. “Everybody was sort of like, ‘Well, where is East?’ and ‘What is it going to be like?’ There was so much unknown. And for that basketball team to win something, it was like, ‘Stand up and notice! East is here!’ It was a big deal. It went from we’re growing, we’re new, to ‘Huh! We’re here!”
Much of East’s early culture was also the work of the school’s first principal, Dave Thaden, who had been an assistant principal at Chapel Hill High and was tasked with opening CHCCS’s newest school. Known for his humorous nature, Thaden once famously pranked the student body by convincing them Britney Spears was transferring to East.
“He just was the heart of the school,” Lipkus said. “There wasn’t a day that went by that he didn’t love this school. He loved everything about it. He pored over every detail. He personally chose the furniture… the tiles, that kind of thing. He took so much pride in the school. You would see him out in his shorts in the summer, mowing [Freshman Hill]. He tried to get to every athletic event, to at least stop by. Whenever a team went to the playoffs, he went. He went to chorus concerts and band concerts. He loved it all. He was so excited about what the kids were doing here.”
Photo courtesy of the East Chapel Hill Yearbook.
As a freshman when East opened, Koplar also remembers Thaden’s unexpected appearances around the school.
“He would just pop up on a bicycle,” Koplar said. “You can hear the Gators and the golf carts coming; you could not hear the bicycle. So you’d just be sitting around between classes chit chatting and then he would roll up—and he knew everybody’s name it felt like, and everybody’s last name—and say ‘Mr. Koplar! About time you moved on to chemistry, isn’t it?’ How he knew I had chemistry was always beyond me, but he seemed to have an aura of knowing.”
Koplar also remembers Thaden, who would always have one pant leg tucked in on the spoke side as he biked, good-naturedly carrying around chewing gum to share with students.
“Every day the first person to ask him for a piece of gum got a piece of gum, and everybody else got disappointment—he held steadfastly to the one piece of gum a day rule,” said Koplar, who also looks back fondly nowadays at Thaden’s qualities as an administrator. “Mr. Thaden was a great human being… a true educator, certainly someone who had a vision for what this high school could be within the community and what his hopes and his dreams for the student body at East were.”
Thaden, who also taught a freshman English class while serving as principal, passed away in 2019, but not before he was able to get to know current principal Ken Proulx.
“Mr. Proulx is a lot like Mr. Thaden,” Davis-Omburo said. “Mr. Proulx has done a lot to bring back a similar climate. Mr. Thaden was very approachable, and I feel like Mr. Proulx is too.”
The two spent an afternoon together in 2018, and Proulx said he appreciated the opportunity to learn from Thaden.
“I was very interested to hear about not just the opening, but the culture and the vision of the opening and how things were established,” Proulx said. “What I wanted to do coming in was to uphold the traditions and to live up to the values that East has grown over the 25 years… What I took from Mr. Thaden that I try to bring to work every day is being student-centered, and staff-centered and building a learning community that isn’t just about academics, but it is about creating a sense of family and a sense of community.”
In the 25 years since the 1996-97 school year, that community has grown quite a bit. It now includes four classes of students, housed in a larger building.
“That’s the natural state of things,” Koplar said of the school’s evolution. “They grow, they change, they are shaped by the kids who walk the halls, and I would say, overwhelmingly shaped positively.”
Another positive: the halls are a lot less muddy now.
Photo by ECHO Staff
