After experiencing nearly 50 first days of school, first as a student and later as a reporter, I’ve realized that some things never change. If you pay close attention when you walk into a school building that first day, you will notice a pleasant smell of clean and sometimes fresh paint. The floors are buffed to a mirror finish.
Belle Plaine’s students will have so much more to experience this week as they make their way back for the start of the 2010-11 school year. A more than $9 million facelift and expansion is nearing completion at Longfellow Elementary School and what is now Belle Plaine Junior-Senior High School. Last week, I had a chance to take a tour of both buildings. One of the first things I noticed in both buildings is just how bright and airy the buildings are. There’s a lot of new windows at both buildings. They’ll probably have to deliver Windex by the tanker load this year!
At Longfellow, I noticed the hallways and wondered if the track and wrestling coaches had any ideas of using them for sprint work in bad weather. The expanded main hall at Longfellow is really long!
Actually, the first thing I noticed when walking into the Longfellow building was how cool it is inside. Both buildings are now air conditioned, which should really help the concentration level in the first month of the school year. I remember visiting teachers in some of those classrooms at Central and the old junior high building early in the school year, wondering how they could work in such heat and how any learning was accomplished.
Over at the high school, there have been plenty of improvements as well. Finally, the main office is just inside the front door, not socked away in a windowless, basement level area. When plans for the renovation and expansion were underway and it became apparent that the offices would be relocated to the main level, whenever I called the high school, I only half-jokingly reported to the secretary what the weather was like, since they didn’t have any windows to the outside from their old office.
Band and chorus students now have a wonderful center to create beautiful music including a larger rehearsal hall, instrument storage area and practice rooms in a new wing of the building.
Our tour group visited a renovated classroom on the library level that is now a science lab. Now, there are work stations for more than 20 students to conduct various science experiments.
Other high school improvements include more classrooms, renovated locker rooms and an elevator – something that has been needed in that building since the day it first opened. At Longfellow, students will notice a great resource center (library) and a larger gym/lunch room with a stage at one end.
The improvements and changes to the facilities in this school district are indeed historic and past due. The changes should have a profound impact on the future of this community. Administrators and board members have devoted a lot of time consulting with architects and contractors to get thing right. Seeing what they have had to deal with makes the report I read from Los Angeles even more mind-boggling.
Next month, 4,200 students in one section of Los Angeles will be going to a new school complex. The Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools cost $578 million. The district has two other complexes under construction, one with a $377 million price tag and the other a mere $232 million. School officials explain that construction costs in Los Angeles are the highest in the country. The price of real estate, seismic construction, etc. At one site, they had to spend $17 million on a methane gas mitigation system after a methane gas field was discovered on the property.
The three schools mention are only three of 131 currently under construction in the Los Angeles School District. They are being funded through $20 billion in bonds and are being built despite a $640 million shortfall in the district’s general fund.
Seeing the wonderful new facilities in our district makes all this information on the Los Angeles Schools mind-boggling. But I doubt even 131 new schools in that community will have the impact on the whole area that our new facilities will have here.
It will be an adventure getting to the Longfellow building in the first few weeks with construction continuing and the narrow Seventh Street in front of the school probably the busiest two-block stretch of pavement in town. But the students should definitely enjoy the improvements. We have a veteran teaching staff and the teachers and administrators deserve the better working conditions.
Once again, the voters in the Belle Plaine district came through in their approval of bonds for these much-needed building projects. We should all be proud of the results. Good luck to all of the students, teachers, administrators and parents of our district this year. Let’s make it a good one!
