Surely any kid who went to only one high school is going to have, at the time, thought it was perfectly normal because that's all they knew? I think our school had 4 floors in both buildings
Mine was kinda ridiculous in retrospect. 16 buildings, for ~1600 students, not counting things like the snack stand at the football field. Actually fairly normal for the area. Even my elementary school has 9 real buildings plus 4 racks of portables.
All real permanent buildings. About half were 2 story, the rest one story. My loose understanding is that when the county set aside land for schools it was basically worthless so the schools got large footprints. The weather in the area was generally good so they save money by making campuses of smallish buildings instead of one big expensive building.
It had two buildings. Is that difficult to understand or what? Historically they were separate schools built close together. (Probably a boys and girls school but I don't remember)
Each had a main part that was a single corridor on 4 floors with classrooms off it. There were extra bits that weren't part of the main corridor, too, which weren't as tall, and the main part also wasn't all classrooms; in one building the bottom floor was, I think, just toilets and changing rooms, then admin offices, and only then were there classrooms, but I can't remember for sure. In the other building there were 3 complete floors of classrooms and I think one half floor, with the rest of the bottommost floor occupied by a gym.
Sorry, it's not that I didn't understand what you said, it's that I can hardly fathom it.
Most high schools I was aware of were two floors. In a single building, and I almost forgot to specify that because I'd never heard of a multi-building high school before.