The halls of Perry High School trigger nostalgia for just about anyone who attended an American high school. Pennants and murals cheering on the Commodores line the main hallway. Posters with encouraging sayings hang outside of classrooms. Glass cabinets display work from the school’s best artists.
But at the very top of a center stairwell is a sight seemingly so out of place, it stops a stroll down memory lane.
Carved into a gray and white marble countertop, decorated with a potted white orchid in full bloom, are the words “Salon Perry” — pronounced pair-ay — and behind that is the school’s brand new career and technical education cosmetology lab, which is a dead ringer for any posh salon.
It took years to gain funding and plan the new facility that opened in early February, but for Angela Mike, Pittsburgh Public Schools’ executive director of the career and technical education division, the concept originated decades before when she was a cosmetology student in the district’s then-brand new Westinghouse High School lab.