Changes since the big fire

Early on the morning of Sept. 14 that world turned upside down, as the elementary school burned to the ground and the high school, connected by a pedway, was damaged by smoke and water. Children lost personal belongings and teachers lost years of work, and both lost, for several weeks, a place to teach and learn.

Today, the scene on the hill is very different. Rows of portable classrooms sit on what used to be the children's playground, while a chain link fence separates them from the site of the old school, where foundations have been laid for a new elementary school.

Next door, the lawns in front of the high school – where English teacher Cindy Hutton used to take her students out to sit under the trees and discuss poetry – have been turned into a parking lot to allow buses an unfettered run across the front of the school. Fortunately, some of the trees are still there. The high school itself is unrecognizable from the outside, with an attractive new skin that makes it look like a completely different building.

I had a chance to look at the changes just before the students returned, a week later than other students on the South Shore. In the front of the building, the whole main entranceway is gone. The new entrance will be at the point where the new elementary school joins the high school, the plan being that instead of two schools sitting side by side, there will just be one education complex.

In the meantime, junior and senior high school students now enter their school on the west side, where a glassed-in structure has been built to contain new stairways. Those stairs are still just new concrete, but board officials expect they will be covered by clay tiles from Italy before the end of the month.

Moving inside on the lower level, major changes are evident. The family studies lab, which used to occupy most of the west end of the building, has been redesigned to allow access to the new stairwells. Work is still underway in that lab, where there are new work stations and cooking facilities for students.

The central stair area where students used to go downstairs, across from the entrance to the gym and cafeteria, is no more. At the lower level, that space has been used to enlarge the library, which now will be a facility handling both elementary and high school needs (space at the other end, next to the industrial arts lab, has also been co-opted for the library). The day I was there, Julie Meisner, who looks after the library, was busily drawing attention to architects of the lack of a sound-proof wall between the library and industrial arts room.

The stage in the gym is getting new curtains, out by the front of the arch, and an accordion wall will be put across where the old curtains were. The stage area will then double as a music and drama room, with a separate room above the old weight room as a practice room.

To get upstairs, I had to return to the west end and go up the new staircase. In the upper section of the school, there have been some other big changes. The top of the front stair area has been turned into a set of rooms for program support. Entrance to the new rooms is through the principal's office, a room familiar to me for many years, but when the new school is completed those walls will come out and the administration offices will be near the new main entrance.

After renovations in the late 1980s, the staff room was located above the cafeteria, with a set of windows overlooking the cafeteria. That area is being changed into a guidance complex, complete with new washrooms and an office for storing files. However, until the new elementary wing is completed, the staff will use it. When the school is whole again, the combined staffs will have a single new staff area.

The other big change is in the computer lab, which is outfitted with rows of new Dell computers.

Outside, the portable classrooms mean the elementary students are still in cramped quarters. Their turn will come, their new school to be completed by March of next year. When it is done, what was two schools sharing facilities and administration will officially become a P-12 school, similar to other new schools in the province which house grades from primary to senior high.

- Tom Sheppard can be reached at twsheppard@gmail.com