The new Columbus Middle School is on schedule for completion before students return from Christmas break. But the state-of-the art, technology-savvy building won”t open for business until Jan. 19, after the Martin Luther King Jr. Day weekend.
District leadership wants to ensure the public has an opportunity to tour the $19.1 million facility before it ushers in sixth-, seventh- and eighth-grade students.
“You only get one chance to open a new building,” Columbus schools Superintendent Del Phillips said before Monday night”s school board meeting. “We want to make sure we do it correctly.”
The delayed opening day also will offer more time to test bells and other equipment, before the grand opening.
Middle-schoolers will return to their regular schools — Hunt Intermediate for sixth-graders and Lee Middle for seventh- and eighth-graders — on Jan. 3. All 952 students will report to the new school on the 19th.
“It”s an exciting time,” said Phillips, noting public tours of the school are scheduled for January, “almost to the day” three years ago, when a $22 million bond issue was passed by a massive 79 percent to build the facility. Bond issues need a 60-percent approval rate to move forward.
The bond issue gained momentum through a grassroots movement, led by the Parents for Public Schools. Now, Phillips wants to give “due diligence to the community, who provided the building for our students.”
“We want to be certain that we give time to the community to come to the new middle school and walk through and look at the teaching and learning environment they have provided for the middle school students in the Columbus school district,” he said.
The 155,000-square-foot middle school is the first new school built in the district since 2005, when Stokes-Beard Elementary School reopened in its current location on MLK Drive, after a 2001 tornado leveled the old building.
Aside from Stokes-Beard, the new middle school marks the first new-school construction project for Columbus Municipal School District in more than four decades.
Built with conservation in mind, West Brothers Construction worked on the project with “green products,” adding, for example, windows that take full advantage of natural light.
Technology also was a key component of plans for the school. Each classroom features built-in space for a Promethean board. Phillips is confident the building will be the most technology-laden middle school in the state.
The middle school utilizes a spoke design, with a central commons area and separate sixth-, seventh- and eighth-grade halls stemming from the commons area. Chris Morrow, of Pryor and Morrow Architects, served as lead architect on the middle school project.
Monday night, the school board scheduled a special meeting to tour the new middle school on Jan. 9, at 2 p.m., a day before its regular January meeting.
Public open houses are scheduled for Jan. 12, 2011, from 4-8 p.m. and Jan. 13, 2011, from 4-8 p.m.
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