The Hawkins middle school in Stranger Things: Mr. Clarke's AV club

The middle school where the party meets again

Before the swimsuits and the high school classrooms, there is middle school. Mike, Dustin, Lucas, and Will cross paths there, play, and get noticed for the wrong reasons. The building is not a monster set. It is a school, with a science teacher who answers when someone asks him a strange question.

The map of Hawkins forces one to place it somewhere between the houses and the woods. The story, for its part, films it from the inside: a hallway, a classroom, later a gym. One does not need the English name engraved on a crest to follow the year.

This middle school lasts for the time of the first cases, then the party leaves it. High school will come. It is not this building, and this building does not have to carry the Tigers or the evening game table.

1. November 1983 The question

   Mike, Dustin, and Lucas ask Mr. Clarke how to travel to another dimension, “theoretically”.

2. The radio The AV club

   The club's new Heathkit, shown to the boys, will serve to look for Will.

3. The hallway Troy and James

   Two bullies, nicknames, an audience. No adult steps in.

4. Chapter 6 The cliff

   “The Monster”. Eleven stops Troy. The boy's arm is broken.

5. Winter 1984 The gym

   The year closes on a Snow Ball, not on a class.

6. After Hawkins High

   Mike, Dustin, and Lucas will leave middle school. It is no longer the same address.

The AV club and Mr. Clarke

Scott Clarke is the science teacher, and he runs the AV club. He put a Heathkit radio in the boys' hands. It is with that radio that they will try to reach Will. The club is not a hobby filmed for its own sake. It is the workshop where children tinker with a question that is too big.

In November 1983, Mike, Dustin, and Lucas come to talk to him about other dimensions, “theoretically”. He answers seriously. The tightrope walker can only go forward or back on the wire. The flea, for its part, can walk underneath, upside down. He has just described the other side to children who are going to go there, without knowing it.

In the same period, he also explains how to make a sensory deprivation bath, to Dustin, Lucas, and Mike. The ideal teacher of the pages read: available, never suspicious. He does not become a hunter. He stays the one who answers.

Troy, James, the hallway

In November 1983, two boys hold the hallway. Troy talks, James follows. Their targets are Mike, Dustin, Lucas, and Will. The article on the bullies of Hawkins details the nicknames and the scene. Here, the middle school is the place: a hallway with an audience, and no adult to stop the pair.

On screen, they have only first names. The surnames come from the production sheets, not from the lines, and I do not paste them back into the dialogue. Troy and James are enough. They operate as a pair, always, and they choose someone who is already alone.

That harassment has no creature behind it. That is why it stays in the school building, and not in the woods. The middle school has its ordinary monsters before it has a radio that picks up the impossible.

Eleven and Troy

Chapter 6 is titled “The Monster”. The cliff scene in it breaks Troy's arm. No adult stops him. It is a child who stops him. Eleven is not a middle school student. She enters this hallway story from the side, and she settles the cliff without a class.

I do not move the cliff into the gym. The pages read separate the places: the hallway for the nicknames, the cliff for the arm. The middle school supplies the bullies. It does not necessarily supply the drop.

After that, Troy and James leave the story faster than they entered it. The building, for its part, goes on. It still has a winter, a teacher, and a dance.

The Snow Ball, in the gym

1984 is not a summer. It is a school year, which closes on a dance in a gym. The end of season 2 names it among what closes the year: the exorcism, the sealed rift, the Snow Ball. The middle school gym is the address of that evening, not a party hall invented next door.

Will finally dances there, after the year the shadow lived in him. The ball does not erase the hallway of 1983. It shows that the same building can serve as a dance floor once the rift is closed, at least for one night.

I do not describe the dresses or the orchestra beyond what these pages fix. A gym, a winter dance, the end of the year 1984, the longest for the party. It is the last big use of the middle school before the younger ones leave it.

Leaving middle school

When Mike, Dustin, and Lucas enter high school, they look for a place to keep playing. It is no longer the AV club, no longer Mr. Clarke's class. Middle school has finished its work: a radio, a lesson, a hallway, a gym.

Mr. Clarke does not disappear from the town for all that. The pages of his article follow him farther, including years later. This text stops at the middle school door. High school is another address, with other jackets.

One can therefore draw the school of the early seasons without confusing it with Hawkins High. The middle school is Clarke, the Heathkit, Troy, and a Snow Ball. Four images, and the party has grown up.

The building does not need a secret wing to matter. A classroom that answers, a hallway that hurts, a gym that dances: that is already a whole school. The rest of the town will come after, in other buildings, much later, when the lockers will have changed floors.

Frequently asked questions

Read next