After attending school for her first years in the Lynn one-room school on Winner Road, Dorothy Van Sice approached the new Hickory High School with some trepidation.

“We were kind of scared,” she said. “You know how kids are.”

Ms. Van Sice entered the school in 1933, in the first freshman class to attend the new school. She later taught in the school and at other Hermitage School District schools during a 37-year career.

With the new school, now Hermitage Middle School, about to close, Ms. Van Sice didn’t even want to talk about her feelings about the school.

“(I feel) Pretty sentimental about it,” Ms. Van Sice’s daughter, Caroline, a 1959 graduate, said of the closing. “Lots of memories.”

The Van Sices, who lived in Hermitage, and dozens of current and former teachers, students, administrators and staff members attended a closing ceremony Tuesday. The school officially closes with the last day of classes today.

School officials have not decided what to do with the school.

Superintendent Karen A. Ionta called the closing a bittersweet occasion, but pledged that the spirit of learning from past staff and students will follow to Hickory High School, where the eighth-graders will attend, and the expanded Delahunty Middle School, which will be home to the seventh-graders.

“We have come here to celebrate the many contributions generated from this building,” Mrs. Ionta said.

People noted the growth of the city since the school opened. It was once across Sharon-Greenville Road from the McConnell Farm, and is now in the heart of the commercial district, across what is now North Hermitage Road from the Shenango Valley Mall.

Ed Derr, who was a junior in 1959, the year before Hickory High School opened and what is now the middle school became a junior high, remembered seeing McConnell’s cows from the school, and playing football behind the school before Hornet Stadium was built behind the new Hickory High School.

Former home economics teacher and guidance counselor Maxine Patterson marked the passage of time with cultural references. She noted that teachers used to teach students square dancing.

“The stroll and rock ’n’ roll came in, so we gave up,” she said.

She also recalled the nuclear attack drills that used to be run periodically.

Derr spoke of the days before hot lunches were standard. He said that one year his home room was in the chemistry lab.