A Work In Progress Maddie Woods
Although some things haven’t changed at Lindbergh, others are changing before people’s eyes. At Lindbergh High School, construction has become a new normal for staff and students for more than a year now with no end in sight just yet. “Technically speaking, the field started in January of 2020. So that was the first real thing we did was Flyers Field. But if you’re talking about building construction, they started tearing down “stuff” in May of 2020. Theoretically it should be done by August of ‘23, so after next school year,” said Dr. Eric Cochran, the high school’s main principal.
Photo of a portion of the new building. Photo taken by Lindbergh Schools.
Staff Writer
“I say all the time that when you walk down our hallways, you can see why we need a new building because every classroom has 3 or 4 kids sitting outside of the room working on the floor. That might still happen, but we’re going to have spaces that’re designed for that purpose, where kids can actually sit on a couch outside a room and collaborate or in a small group room. There’s a lot of cool spaces like that in the new building,” explained Dr. Cochran. Also with construction, not everything was necessarily about safety. “The last major reason is because all of the infrastructural pieces that feed this building, heat, air conditioning, electricity, they were all reaching the end of their natural lifecycle and they were all going to have to be replaced and it was much cheaper in a new building then to actually do that in an old building,” explained Dr. Cochran.” One of the first major construction events was the tearing down of the Math building. The Math building housed most, if not all, of the Math classes as well as the teachers. Since then, teachers in all subjects have been shuffled around to the other two buildings to accommodate for space. Unfortunately, that meant that not everybody was going to be fortunate enough to have their own classroom space. Some teachers have become Traveling Teachers meaning they travel from classroom to classroom. Some use a cart to get around that holds all of the materials needed for their classes. The Traveling Teachers use other teachers’ classrooms for a class and then possibly move to another classroom to do it all over again. Also, because the new building won’t be done until the 2023-2024 school year, those Traveling Teachers will continue to travel next year as well.
Although this whole project won’t be completed for a while, there are some things that are currently done and are available for staff and students now. For instance, the football field is now a turf field and is being used for football games and practices, including some field hockey games, and other events, like pep rallies for school, have been held on the field. The commons also has been updated as well as the main gym: Gym 3. The question on most people’s minds is why so much money is being spent on a new school? “The big reason for the one building is primarily safety, with the old campus prior to it’s partial demolition, there were 60 doors that could be opened at any given time and unlocked on our campus. That was the only way for students to get to different classes that they would have was to keep all of those doors unlocked at any time. Which meant that anyone could theoretically walk onto our campus, walk into a door and nobody would be able to stop them and so with an inclosed, single building campus, we can shut down all doors and have one point of entry per person when the day starts and that will allow us to put our security there, a check-in point there, and they’ll come in through that location,” explained Dr. Cochran. People familiar with Lindbergh see a common occurrence outside of each classroom. Every once in a while students and/or teachers will be heard complaining that their classroom space is too small or is too crowded for students to comfortably work on the task at hand. This is a concern that’s also being felt by the administration. Drone shot of the construction site. Photo taken by Lindbergh Schools
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Profile 02.25.22
