More than 6,000 students from across the Yukon have graduated from F.H. Collins Secondary School.

They're all right there – photographs of every one of them on the famous Wall of Fame which provides humourous trips down Memory Lane with insights into the fashions and hairstyles of the day, for every year since the high school opened in 1963.

It's a nest egg of entertainment for former students, children of former students – grandchildren of former students.

For decades, F.H. was the only game in town for aspiring teens who didn't attend Catholic school.

When principal Hank Bugara welcomed its first 315 students, the Riverdale neighbourhood was still in Kindergarten, and the site for Vanier Secondary was still moose pasture.

Porter Creek was barely on the map.

Now, after half a century, the alma mater for so many is scheduled to be demolished.

"It always makes you feel old when they tear down a building you watched being built,”chuckled Bob Cameron in an interview this week.

Growing up on Elliott Street, the aviation historian attended the Lambert Street primary school in Grade 1 back in 1951. With the completion of the new Whitehorse Elementary High School on Fourth Avenue in 1952, he and every other public school student in town moved in.

Cameron attended Whitehorse Elementary High until halfway through his graduating year. He remembers by the fall of 1962, the student population was so large that the senior grades were required to go to school in shifts, his being the 7:30 a.m- to-12:30 p.m. shift.

On Jan. 15, they moved into F.H.

It was new, and it was brighter, but one knew right away it was not as solid as the block of concrete on the Fourth Avenue school, he recalled.

"One of our teachers in high school was a fellow by the name of Jack Hulland,” Cameron pointed out. "He was just a great guy. It was like having your grandfather in class.

"He used to fight back in World War One in the trenches with the rats, and he'd tell us stories about that.”

Cameron was among the first 36 students of F.H. Collins' first graduating class, the Class of '63.

So what will new F.H. look like?

Nobody's sure.

Where will it sit on the site? Same.

All anybody knows right now is there's a mountain of work ahead if the new school is to be ready for the 2012-13 school year.

Beginning next week, the first in a series of planning workshops will be held at the high school.

"We want to end up with a product so that it is fun to go to school, so that students want to go to school and staff end up with a learning environment that is the best it can be,” Tim Turner-Davis of FSC Architects and Engineers told the Star this week.

"The design process has just started, and it takes us right through until about a year from now.

"The intent is the government wants to get it out for tender by April or May of next year.”

Turner-Davis is the leader for the consulting team put together by FSC, the company hired for just under $3 million to design and administer the construction of the new school, scheduled to be complete by the end of 2012.

The Yukon government has tentatively identified $50 million as the total project cost, while Turner-Davis said about $38 million is earmarked for construction.

There is, he emphasized, much to be done to reach consensus on a variety of matters, from the final design to how to go about construction while maintaining a functional learning environment for the 600 F.H. students.

"This is all stuff that is going to be discussed, debated.”

FSC does, however, bring with it a substantial portfolio of work in the North, including 100 new schools across the three territories, Turner-Davis pointed out.

He actually moved from Yellowknife to open the Whitehorse office while planning the new school for Old Crow, which was built to replace the old school that burned down in the late 1990s.

There will be extensive consultation around the design of the new facility, Turner-Davis pointed out.

"It is going to be a real balancing act to keep all groups informed and involved, including the first nations.”

It's essential, he said, to involve the students and staff, because they know what they have and know what they need.

He said one staff member, for instance, has expressed a desire to somehow reduce the distance students sometimes have to walk between classes.

Having been added onto over the years, the school is quite spread-out, the architect pointed out.

Currently, the school is 130,000 square feet. The plan is to bring that down to 90,000, but much of the reduction could be realized in reducing the area of the travel corridors, he said.

Turner-Davis suggested going up rather than out may be the answer.

"One of the things we know is when you minimize your exterior skin, you improve your energy efficiency.”

There's also the question of whether to tie the new structure to the industrial wing – the only section that will not be torn down – and if so, how to go about doing it, he said.

"We are working closely with the building advisory committee and will be holding workshops with students and teachers just to gather as much as we can to get a real good handle on this project,” he said. "Innovation is the focus, and flexible space.”

One thing, however, is relatively certain in Turner-Davis' mind: the Wall of Fame will be again featured in a space of prominance in the new F.H. Collins Secondary School.