Over the past month, students and staff have watched the ongoing construction of the all-new main entrance of Mayfield High School, which will open in late 2023.

According to principal Jeff Legan, excessive traffic was a factor in the decision to construct a new main entrance. He said, “Because Miner Road is directly across from the high school, it makes sense. Rather than take a road onto Wilson Mills and then a left, people could just go straight in.”

Despite the entrance opening in December, construction will be completed before next school year, having started on March 23. “[The entrance] is not going to be operational until December because the traffic light is on a 32-week delay,” Legan said.

The current main entrance will be turned into an emergency entrance. “There’ll be an armgate there, and so when the fire truck comes in, or an ambulance, it will recognize it and the arm will go up. It will only be used for emergency vehicles,” Legan said.

History teacher Michael Hughes, who has taught at the high school for 21 years, thinks the new entrance will be a big improvement. He said, “Those intersections are really busy, and also you can’t make a left from Wilson Mills westbound into the entrance on the eastern side of the Innovation Center.”

According to Hughes, the new entrance will make sense for the flow of traffic. “It’s the bottleneck of people trying to get to school on time over the years. There’s a lot of problems with that, [so] this hopefully will alleviate that,” he said.

The new entrance will allow many students including junior Allison Spencer to get to school quicker. “I’m excited that it will relieve a lot of the traffic, and it will help with attendance. I think it’ll just make things easier,” Spencer said.

The current entrance has made getting to school on time difficult for Spencer. “The traffic getting to school and the waiting has been a problem with the one entrance, so the new one will be helpful.”

Despite the closure of the current main entrance, the Lander entrance will remain open. Legan said, “We’re looking at other ways to beautify it, one of those being we want to look at new signage. And it’s actually rotted.”

Unrelated to the main entrance construction, the simultaneous Wilson Mills Road construction project across the street continues to affect drivers in-and-out of the high school. Legan said, “It was almost a perfect storm. It’s horrible.”

The driveway entrance project began with the trees being cleared very quickly due to a bat ordinance in Mayfield Village. “We actually had to clear all of the trees by April 15 [because] once bats start to build their nest, you can’t take it down, you can’t destroy it. There were so many intriguing things that we learned along the way, at least I learned along the way,” Legan said.