For 16-year-old Becca Ridge, Pittsburgh Schenley High School has been a gateway to the future and link with the past, a combination that helps to explain the vaunted "Schenley spirit."

Becca, a Highland Park resident completing her junior year, is in Schenley's International Baccalaureate program, which offers top students advanced course work to help prepare them for a global economy.

Also important to her, she said, was the opportunity to take art class in the room where Andy Warhol, a 1945 graduate, had his.

"I feel privileged to work in that space," Becca said during her lunch period one day last week.

Today marks the end of the school year for most Pittsburgh Public Schools, and if Superintendent Mark Roosevelt has his way, this will be the last school day ever at Schenley's 92-year-old Oakland building.

Mr. Roosevelt wants the school board to vote June 25 to close the building because of maintenance problems, a move roundly criticized by students, parents, alumni and other supporters.

He says an overhaul would cost $76.2 million, while supporters say it would be possible to do smaller-scale renovations for less.

Under Mr. Roosevelt's proposal, Becca and other remaining students would go to the Reizenstein building in Shadyside next school year and stay together, as a dwindling Schenley student body, until their classes graduate.

The idea displeases school supporters, who contend that Schenley minus the historic building in bustling, high-tech Oakland would be a little like Warhol without his white hair and eccentric air.

No matter how the battle over the building plays out -- supporters are lobbying school board members and city officials to keep it open -- the Schenley of today may be lost forever.

Even if the board renovates the building, officials insist that students could not remain there during the work. Also, Mr. Roosevelt would cut Schenley's student pipeline with his proposal to send future ninth-graders to new schools.

The Schenley debate has been followed by alumni nationwide.

Navy Cmdr. Bill Mitchell, director of policy logistics at the Navy International Programs Office in Arlington, Va., credits Schenley's teachers, programs and diverse student body with opening his eyes to the world.

"It was a great place to go to school," the 1985 graduate said.

The triangular building, hailed as an architectural gem, showed small signs of battle fatigue last week.

Some papers were strewn in a hallway. Some classrooms had packing containers, and trophy cases had been emptied, the memorabilia set to reappear at Reizenstein.

Supporters doubt the rest of the school will transfer so easily.

Students wonder whether they'll have a full complement of extracurricular activities at Reizenstein and how many buses they'll have to take to get there.

Reizenstein isn't as accessible for some as Schenley.

"I don't know how I'm going to get there," Aaron Guy, 16, of the North Side, said last week in the waning days of his junior year.

Students worry about smaller art rooms at Reizenstein and the lack of a high school-style auditorium. Reizenstein, a former middle school building, has a cafeteria-auditorium combination, called a "cafetorium."

"I'm going to miss being in a high school. I don't want to go to a middle school," said Charlie Mietzner, 17, of Highland Park, who will be a senior in the fall.

Students lament the potential loss of Oakland's amenities, like the Carnegie museums, the Carnegie Library and the ethnic diversity billed as an important part of the school's international studies/IB program.

Students also rue the loss of Schenley's tradition, reputation and history, qualities that make "attending the school more valuable," Becca said.

Warhol is one on a list of famous alumni. Others include jazz musicians, professional athletes and a Nobel Prize-winning physicist.

Pittsburgh Allderdice High School in Squirrel Hill may be traditionally regarded as the top-achieving high school in the city and Pittsburgh High School for the Creative and Performing Arts, Downtown, the one with the most panache.

But Schenley has something "intangible," as Mount Washington resident Sharon Brady said at a meeting on the school's fate in November, referring to a student bond that cuts across academic and social lines.

Cmdr. Mitchell felt it a quarter-century ago. He lived in the Hill District but had friends in various neighborhoods because, he said, "you really just sort of identified with everybody" at Schenley.

The school long has been a source of city pride.

The Schenley Spartans basketball teams were a state powerhouse in the 1960s and '70s, the school's musicals consistently win acclaim and its bright, well-behaved students have been the school district's contribution to the city's cerebral center.

In the late 1980s, Schenley was one of only 274 high schools worldwide offering the Swiss-based IB program; today, it is one of 1,770 worldwide.

The late Roger R. Babusci Jr., an English teacher who directed the school musicals, was named state teacher of the year in 1982.

Cmdr. Mitchell said he still likes to drive past Schenley when he's back in town, "kind of smile and say, 'Those were good days.' "