Yellow Springs-based public radio station 91.3 WYSO is making big waves.

As of last week, the homegrown station has officially moved its operations out of the Charles F. Kettering building on the Antioch College campus and into the historic Union Schoolhouse at 314 Dayton St.

With the flip of a switch at high noon on Wednesday, March 18, WYSO made its flagship broadcast from its newly renovated 19th-century digs.

The first audio to sound out was a snippet from the station’s first 1958 broadcast. Station Manager Luke Dennis thanked the listeners, supporters, staff and volunteers who made the move possible, then disc jockey Evan Miller jumped right back into his Midday Music program with some Talking Heads.

There wasn’t a second of dead air in the signal transfer.

WYSO staffers and volunteers strike a pose in the spacious atrium of the newly renovated Union Schoolhouse. The project’s architect Max Crome aimed to hollow out the center of the original building and install a glass skylight at the top, allowing natural light to cascade down all three stories. Surrounding the center staircase are offices and meeting rooms. On the bottom floor are the station’s vast archives. (Photo by Reilly Dixon)

“It was truly the proudest moment of my professional career,” Dennis told the News last week.

Built in 1872, the Union Schoolhouse and an adjacent lot were purchased in 2020 for a total of $550,000 by Iron Table Holdings, the real estate company owned by local resident and comedian Dave Chappelle.

In past iterations, Union Schoolhouse was the first integrated school in Yellow Springs, then later, the Village’s municipal offices, and most recently, a shared space for small businesses and art studios. The building sat vacant for about five years and fell into disrepair until it was purchased by Chappelle.

At a 2021 Planning Commission meeting, Iron Table’s architect Max Crome, of Crome Architecture, unveiled plans to rehab and expand the 19th-century building into a shared space for Chappelle’s professional offices and WYSO’s new headquarters; those plans were unanimously approved by the commissioners at the time.

In addition to wholly rehabbing the original structure, Iron Table’s plans included the construction of a new two-story, 10,000-square-foot space to adjoin the schoolhouse’s western facade.

WYSO now leases 19,000 square feet between the original structure and the addition — specifically, the station occupies the bottom two of the schoolhouse’s three stories, as well as the first floor of the two-floor addition. All else will be used as professional office space for Chappelle’s Iron Table Holdings and his Pilot Boy Productions.

According to Dennis, WYSO’s capital investment in the schoolhouse renovations is approaching $4 million — money for new equipment, furniture, wiring and more; Chappelle’s, he said, is nearly $13 million.

“We’re incredibly grateful for his investment in public radio,” Dennis said. “Dave’s been a listener for a long time, and as a cultural anchor himself, I think he supports us because he believes we’re also a local anchor.”

Dennis said that although WYSO will pay more in rent for the schoolhouse — $16 per square foot — than “the sweetheart deal” the station had with Antioch, he said the “state-of-the-art quality” of the new station is entirely worth the price tag.

Director of Operations Peter Hayes at work in his new recording studio. (Photo by Reilly Dixon)

“There’s no other public radio station like this, with this kind of high-end equipment, with this beautiful of a space tailored to our exact needs,” Dennis said. “It has to be the best in the country right now.”

That’s by and large thanks to Crome’s handiwork, Dennis said.

“This whole thing is bespoke,” he said.

The curb appeal attests. By the sidewalk along Dayton Street is a 30-foot-tall chimney swift tower meant to rehome the birds displaced by the construction — the birds that used to habitate the old schoolhouse’s previous chimney.

A prominent sidewalk guides visitors inside — a feature that Dennis said the Kettering building lacked.

“Nobody really knocked on our door,” he said. “Now, we’re really prominent — almost downtown, and we want people to just drop in. And now, we have a front desk where a volunteer — we’re now calling our volunteer team the Amplifier Corps — will greet you with a smile and show you around.”

Dennis noted that WYSO has a regular rotating cast of about 30 volunteers, but with the demands of the new space and future membership drives, he hopes to recruit many dozens more.

The inside of the schoolhouse is open and airy. A skylight at the crest of the entry room floods all three stories in natural light that plays on the exposed brick and iron beams — “That are going nowhere for the next 200 years,” Dennis said of the building’s newfound sturdiness.

A 4,000-tile mosaic by villager Naysan McIlhargey adorns a front wall, showing wildflowers blooming below a radio transmission tower and a sky of swifts.

Station Manager Luke Dennis peers up at the new skylight that floods all three stories of the schoolhouse with natural light. (Photo by Reilly Dixon)

Offices and meeting rooms line the atrium’s perimeter, with a stairwell in the center. On the bottom floor are more offices and archival spaces — temperature- and humidity-controlled rooms lined with shelves of old tape reels, documents and film.

“We do news, music and storytelling, and we’ve added preservation as a pillar of our public service because we’re living in a moment in which history is actively being rewritten,” Dennis explained.

Dennis added that he envisions a kind of “reading room” among the schoolhouse’s archives — a place for the public to comfortably spend time among the stacks for research, pleasure or both.

“Take for example, if someone’s doing research on the anti-war movement in small towns in America, this would be the perfect place to come — we have so much documentation on rallies and programming at Antioch,” he said.

Back upstairs and past the dense layers of original limestone that crews had to cut through, one next finds themself in WYSO’s new performance space, which will soon be able to seat 110 audience members around an intimate stage and screen.

Dennis said he’s already in talks with local groups and organizations — such as Chamber Music in Yellow Springs and the YS Film Festival — with the hopes of soon having live performances that could be recorded and broadcasted.

Just beyond this space are nine recording studios — rooms carefully engineered to optimize the sound of the human voice and neutralize “bad” frequencies, as Dennis put it. The rubber below the “floating” floors, the double-paned windows, the specialty HVAC, the bass traps along the walls — all of these designs amount to incredibly quiet rooms, or as Dennis put it, “entirely new planes of existence.”

“Everything’s been done at the highest level,” he said. “I want donors to know that their money went toward the greatest studio setup that any station could have.”

He continued: “Our promise to anyone who’s trained with us in our community programs can come in and use our equipment to do their voice tracking or any other creative work they might have. So this additional space means that no one has to wait in line.”

WYSO’s new home at the Union Schoolhouse ought to signify for villagers and listeners a kind of resiliency, Dennis said.

As the News has reported over the last year, public radio had taken some sizable hits. Last August, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting — a decades-old nonprofit that helped pay for PBS, NPR and 1,500 public radio and televisions across the country — was defunded by Congress.

For WYSO, that meant the loss of $300,000 in planned operating funds for this fiscal year and beyond; that amounts to a little under 10% of the station’s budget, which for 2026 is $3.4 million.

The Union Schoolhouse facing Dayton Street, with the chimney swift tower in the foreground. (Photo by Reilly Dixon)

“This building is a show of strength for us,” Dennis said. “Just look around the country and you’ll see public radio stations eliminating programs and cutting staff. Not to brag, but we haven’t cut a single staff member nor have we eliminated any programs.”

Presently, WYSO employs 23 full-time staffers and more than a dozen freelancers and contractors.

Anticipating some security, Dennis maintained that WYSO’s relationship with Chappelle is just that of a tenant and a landlord. While Chappelle will have a presence in the radio station itself, he will in no way have an influence on what gets broadcast and reported.

“Our politics are our own and Dave has his,” Dennis said. “When you look at his career, his independence and autonomy have always been his top priorities. Free speech is crucially important to [WYSO and him].”

The News’ several attempts to reach Chappelle or his publicist for comment were unsuccessful.

Dennis continued: “Public radio and independent journalism has never been more important than it is now. And this building is a huge investment in keeping those things here — right here in Yellow Springs — for a long time.”

A ribbon cutting for WYSO’s newly renovated Union Schoolhouse will be Thursday, April 9. Then, on April 18, 10  a.m.-4 p.m., the public is invited to an open house, featuring live music, tours, kids activities and food trucks.