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The career and technical education building at Rockbridge County High School, known since its beginning as the Floyd S. Kay Vocational Center, has been renamed the Rockbridge Innovation Center.
The Rockbridge County School Board voted last week to change the building’s name to usher in a new era of CTE as the school system prepares to start significant renovations on the center.
At the Board meeting on March 14, Superintendent Phillip Thompson said, “We’re also at an exciting time wrap- ping around that CTE framework and we’re getting ready to undergo a massive renovation of our current Floyd S. Kay Vocational Center [which has been around] since the 1970s when it was originally the stand-alone building and Rockbridge County High School proper was built around it in 1992. It’s far past time for that vocational center to be renovated, and we’re going through complete renovation all next year…” Thompson continued, “When it’s all said and done at the end of next year and the beginning of the following school year, we should have a relatively brand new facility there – modern, upgraded – with all of the changes and the focus on CTE and now the push for looking towards the future, you all had discussed last month about potentially upgrading the name to make it a little more forward thinking.”
When the school opened in the 1970s, the idea for a high school vocationaltech center in and of itself was “forward thinking.” In the mid-1960s, Rockbridge County schools were troubled by a large number of students dropping out of classes prematurely, according to the 1980 book “A Brief History of Public Education in Rockbridge County, Lexington, and Buena Vista.”
The superintendent at the time, Floyd S. Kay, oversaw the creation of a committee that addressed the growing concern, which eventually led to a resolution in 1965 that called for the creation of a centrally located vocational- technical center that could cater to all students’ needs rather than just those college-bound. The School Board purchased land from Virginia Military Institute north of Lexington for the site of the new school, which would serve students from the county, Lexington and Buena Vista.
Shortly after that, the Rockbridge and Buena Vista school divisions commissioned a study of educational needs – Lexington was doing a separate one – that resulted in a report in 1967 that called for the merger of all three local school divisions. In 1968, the county School Board voted in favor of a centrally located high school with a strong vocational component.
After Buena Vista backed out of school system consolidation efforts in 1971, the county proceeded to design a new high school for all county and Lexington students, and a bond referendum was held and passed. However, when bids for the consolidated high school came in much higher than expected, plans for the high school were dropped. Some of the funds raised from the bond sale were then used to build the vocational center, and on Dec. 1, 1975, the Board voted to name the school after the person who set the process in motion – the Floyd S. Kay Vocational-Technical Center. The school opened that following year on Nov. 1, 1976.
The School Board had been inspired to commemorate the years of dedicated service Kay had contributed to the Rockbridge school system. Beginning his teaching career in 1927, Kay became the superintendent for Rockbridge County schools in 1949. Throughout his 20 years as superintendent, Kay developed multiple school improvement plans with the vocational-technical center as his greatest accomplishment.
“We don’t intend to forget about Superintendent Kay,” Thompson remarked to the School Board. “There will be a place of honor for him in this building to make sure that we remember our past and learn from it and continue to move forward.”
As the nation has begun recognizing and valuing CTE curriculum more and more, Thompson and the RCSB feel it’s time to “[revive the center] to the point where we’re looking to the future,” Thompson commented.
