Education in Granville

When the Four Corners were laid out in the original plat, a schoolhouse was planned along with a church as the first public building shared by all.

The New England forebearers from Granville, Massachusetts, had already set a high priority on learning and scholarship, a value they carried with them in their ox carts and among their belongings.

Books and musical instruments and a love of education were as important to the initial settlers as a sharp axe and sturdy yoke for the oxen, and they were put to work just as quickly.

The old schoolhouse on the Four Corners is gone, but is remembered in the lessons and examples set before today’s children at the elementary, intermediate, middle, and high schools. They win awards, and the village is happy to let the realtors talk about the standing of the “Granville Exempted School District” (some say one of the ten best districts in the state of Ohio, others simply declare that the test scores show them to be the best in the state), but local residents are very little interested in comparing Granville Schools to other districts at all.

What gives energy and focus to conversations about education in Granville today is the question “are our schools the very best they can possibly be, and what do we need to do as a community to make them even better than they are right now?” It is with that kind of attention that everything in the district is under constant review, from the meals served in the cafeterias, to the scholarship support for the 90+% of graduates who go to college.

With a college on the hill overlooking Granville proper, the assumption that grads will go on to higher education is built literally into the local landscape. Called Denison University, founded as Granville College in 1831, the four year undergraduate private liberal arts institution casts a literal shadow over the village, although it might be more accurate to say it shines a light of learning across the homes and businesses and activities of our town.

From the tall steeple of Swasey Chapel atop College Hill to the lower campus down near the center of the village, venues for entertainment and activity imply a certain educational quality to everything from a string quartet to a Beatles impersonation concert on the lower quadrangle (where the Granville Recreation Commission puts on a “Concerts on the Green” series every summer after the students depart for the season).

Guest speakers from the worlds of politics, the arts, and entertainment come to Denison for presentations open to anyone in the area, and not a few of those guests were once students here themselves, like Steve Carell of “The Office” fame or Michael Eisner, former Disney CEO; Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana is still a regular visitor to campus as a member of the college board of trustees, and Jennifer Garner is often photographed wearing her “Denison” hoody.

Copyright 2009 by Jeff Gill