CORONAVIRUS (COVID-19) RESOURCE CENTER Read More
Add To Favorites

New school ready for its close-up

Daily Independent - 3/6/2020

Mar. 6--RACELAND The new Raceland-Worthington Middle School is almost ready for students to move in, and the district is showing it off to the community Saturday.

An open house at 11 a.m. will give people the chance to view the school, which eventually will house grades three through eight.

The building includes 29 classrooms, a 10,000-square-foot gymnasium, a cafeteria and second-floor library.

The school was designed with separate wings for each grade, district treasurer Dustin Stephenson said. Plans call for grades three through five to be housed on the first floor and 6-8 on the second floor, he said.

The 70,000-square-foot school is double the size of the building it replaces, the 93-year-old Worthington Elementary. Its outer walls are built from an insulated concrete product that fits together "like LEGO blocks" and provides up to 10 times the insulating ability of cinder block construction, Stephenson said.

Lighting is LED throughout, with motion-detecting sensors in classrooms that automatically extinguish lights when unoccupied.

All furnishings, including student desks and seats, teacher desks, office furniture, cafeteria tables and library bookshelves are new and built by inmates under a contract with Kentucky Correctional Industries. KCI is a Kentucky Department of Corrections program that employs inmates to teach job skills and reduce recidivism.

The contract enabled the district to get better quality furnishings for considerable savings, Stephenson said.

Classrooms also are equipped with 75-inch flat-screen panels with annotation capability and video conferencing capability. The screens were manufactured by a company owned by 2005 Raceland graduate Joseph Smith.

All students at Raceland are issued Chromebook computers capable of linking to the screens.

The gymnasium seats up to 550 on its bleachers and has a hardwood floor.

The second-floor STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) laboratory has 32 student stations at eight tables and will be available for all grades, Stephenson said. The lab is flanked by two STEM classrooms.

Teachers already are preparing their classrooms for the big move. Shifting from Worthington to the new building has some concrete advantages and others less tangible, according to fifth-grade science and art teacher Lynn Colegrove. "The heat is going to work. The windows are going to work," said Colegrove, whose mother and grandmother were Worthington pupils and who attended Worthington herself as a child.

More important, having all the district's students on a single campus brings opportunities for children to work with children of other ages, such as having middle school students work with elementary children and bringing in high school students to mentor middle-schoolers, she said.

It also enables faculty to build long-term teaching relationships with children, said librarian Jarrod Stephens, who was shelving books in the media center Thursday.

"This library is not just going to be a book depository. It's going to be a place to learn," he said.

The school is a few yards away from the rear doors of the high school, and seventh- and eighth-graders will go to the high school one period per day for elective classes such as art, band and consumer science.

The district also built new tennis courts because the building displaced the existing ones, and a new track. It also installed ornamental aluminum fencing and lighted sidewalks. Existing roads and drives were augmented by new paving that provides a road around the perimeter of the campus.

Construction cost of the school was $13.6 million, less than the $16 million initially expected. Total price tag of the project, including architect fees and other costs, was $16.6 million.

The district was able to afford the school because it enacted a tax levying an additional five cents per hundred dollars valuation to property taxes. Because it enacted the tax, the state awarded matching funding. The district got additional money from a state fund for urgent needs.

According to Stephenson, the first students -- grades four through six -- will move to the new school from Worthington ElementaryMarch 16. Grades seven and eight will remain in the high school building for the remainder of the school year and make the change next year.

Ultimately third-graders, who now attend Campbell Elementary, will go to the new school, which will alleviate overcrowding at Campbell.

(606) 326-2652 -- mjames@dailyindependent.com

___

(c)2020 The Daily Independent (Ashland, Ky.)

Visit The Daily Independent (Ashland, Ky.) at www.dailyindependent.com

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.