Teachers weigh in on facilities plan

During a Jan. 14 meeting, members of the Alleghany County Board of Education discussed facilities planning with representatives from Pinnacle Architecture and four local school teachers.

Speaking to those present, Superintendent Jeff Cox explained, "We're getting close to presenting the final draft of this middle school plan." Motioning to Frank Williams and Randy Baker with Pinnacle Architecture in Matthews, Cox continued, "These fellas have been working with us for a long time on different renditions of this. Just to put what we hope (are) the finishing touches on it, we wanted to make sure that what we were doing made sense also to teachers who have some knowledge about how this ought to flow as far as the whole interworkings of the middle school."

Cox continued, "We've got a building design here that we're settled on as far as the layout and footprint of the building goes. Before we publish this and put it out there as 'the plan,' we just want to get a little bit more clarity to make sure we're on the same page of where some of the classrooms would go and how this is going to all connect together."

Individuals in attendance gathered around a table in the central office conference room to look over the proposed first floor plan, as well as proposals that demonstrated proposed elevation aspects of the potential middle school building.

Looking at the proposed first floor plan, Cox said, "As we counted classrooms John (Farrelly, assistant superintendent) and I have had a lot of discussion...There are a couple different ways to look at it. One way would be to get all of the classrooms over in the new part as far as the sixth, seventh and eighth grade classrooms; you've got roughly six classrooms per grade level. If you did that, then your media center and all of your resource classes and so forth would be located up here in this building. While it might be nice to (have) all of those sixth, seventh and eighth grade classrooms in the new section, from the instructional point of view, you want to be in a school where you have some of those resources located in the center of the school. From a management point of view, I do feel like we need to look at ways to accomplish having some of those things that all of the kids are going to access, like the media center and the cafeteria, located in a place where you're not trucking all the way back and forth across the school."

Offering his comments, Farrelly stated, "Where we get into a lot of debate with this is the arts building and should we have the sixth grade upstairs or downstairs? Having it upstairs, it's very convenient coming off the ramp, it's on the same floor. You've got some decent-sized rooms up there. There's two rooms on the ends which are a little bit smaller, maybe not as attractive or user friendly as the bottom floor. There's a lot of upsides to having the enrichment classes on the bottom floor. You've got flexibility with the different classes there, there's running water. The way they're laid out is a little more user friendly in terms of putting vocational classes in there." Later in the discussion, Farrelly commented, "In an ideal world, we could put the sixth graders in a brand new building. That being said, I think it makes a lot of sense instructionally to go with a plan to put them in the arts building." Williams recommended that the sixth graders be placed on the second floor.

 

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