New NLR elementary school first to open in districtwide overhaul

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/BENJAMIN KRAIN --06/25/14--
North Little Rock School District deputy superintendent Beth Stewart, left, tours the district's new Meadow Park Elementary School with principal Chris Sierra, right, and other district administrators.  Amboy, Lakewood and Boone Park Elementary schools as well as North Little Rock High School are also new construction projects for the North Little Rock School District.

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/BENJAMIN KRAIN --06/25/14-- North Little Rock School District deputy superintendent Beth Stewart, left, tours the district's new Meadow Park Elementary School with principal Chris Sierra, right, and other district administrators. Amboy, Lakewood and Boone Park Elementary schools as well as North Little Rock High School are also new construction projects for the North Little Rock School District.

Monday, July 21, 2014

For the first time in nearly 45 years, the North Little Rock School District will start this school year with the opening of a newly constructed school -- a new Meadow Park Elementary to replace a building with the same name in the Prothro Junction area of the city.

And three more new school buildings are to open in the 9,000-student North Little Rock district later in the 2014-15 school year. Move-in dates for the new Amboy, Lakewood and Boone Park elementaries are set for the Thanksgiving and Christmas/New Year holiday periods.

It doesn't end there.

Evidence of that is the expansive construction site on Main Street at North Little Rock High-West Campus; the recently started expansions at Crestwood and Indian Hills elementaries; and the new fence set up around what will become a new Glenview Elementary.

Improvements to the Seventh Street, Ridgeroad and Pike View campuses are forthcoming.

The North Little Rock district's $265.5 million capital improvement program -- approved by the School Board in April 2011 and backed by a voter-approved 7.4-mill tax increase in February 2012 -- is unprecedented in the state in both scope and cost.

The capital improvement plan will reduce the district's 21 campuses to 13, nearly all of which will be newly built or extensively remodeled, at costs ranging from about $2 million to convert Ridgeroad Middle to an elementary school to $108 million at North Little Rock High School-West Campus. The cost for each of five brand-new elementaries will average about $13.5 million.

While the building improvement program has had some funding hiccups and generated some parking and scheduling challenges, North Little Rock Superintendent Kelly Rodgers said he is pleased with the status of the work.

"It's going to plan," he said. "Everything is falling into place and coming in on budget, as we wanted. We were able to shut down a school a little early -- Lynch Drive Elementary. The new Lakewood, Amboy and Boone Park schools are opening a little late, but it's all balancing out."

With the new construction comes new vocabulary: atriums, learning towers, locking vestibules, circulation spines, learning stairs, black box theater. The just finished Meadow Park Elementary -- the prototype for four more elementaries in the works -- features cloud ceilings, discovery hallways and a commons area.

The new schools and their features reflect a changed approach in education, building planners said.

"The fact is that in 21st century education, everything is about the student and the teacher and the collaboration that goes on," said Brad Kiehl, master architect for the building program and a partner in the DLR Group of Overland Park, Kan.

And, in contrast to existing schools with narrow hallways and closed-off rooms, "when you enter a new facility, there will be learning going on everywhere," Kiehl added.

"What our design teams wanted to do is open up the facility so that when you are walking down that main hall, you can see what is going on in the media center and you can see what is happening in the art room," he said about the elementary schools. "And then when you enter into each individual learning area, it's not just a long hallway, but it's an educational hallway where teachers can let groups or teams of students into the space to work on projects."

Angles and Heights

The new Meadow Park, opening for classes Aug. 18, will serve up to 473 in pre-kindergarten through fifth grade from the combined Meadow Park and Lynch Drive Elementary attendance zones. The new school is a long stretch of a building at 801 E. Bethany Road.

Neutral light-brown bricks and long, horizontal, gray-metal panels set off the occasional medium-blue panels and matching blue window trim on the building front.

The blue panels used as an accent inside and out will differentiate Meadow Park from other campuses.

Each of the new elementary schools will be of the same design and use the same materials, but the materials are slightly modified to give each campus an individual identity, Kiehl said. The exterior, horizontal, metal panels used at Meadow Park are vertical at Lakewood and accented with yellow.

At Amboy, the metal panels are fluted and the trim is orange, Kiehl said. The rectangular, metal panels are different sizes at Boone Park.

The 67,000-square-foot Meadow Park is a blend of heights and angles.

The front of the school, with its office suite and classroom hallways for the youngest pupils, is a single story. The back, with classrooms for older pupils and the commons area, is two stories.

The media center/computer laboratory serves as a transition between the two, with its roof starting low on the south and rising to the two-story level on the north. The exterior wall of the media center is all windows. The room's lower-hanging "cloud ceiling" -- an architectural device -- is spaced away from that wall so as not to block all the natural light from the tallest of the windows.

The school's art room is in the middle of the campus. The slant is not in the roof line but in the walls that lean out from the floor at greater than 90-degree angles.

Classroom hallways branch off the main hallway. Each classroom hallway is painted in vivid shades of orange or green or blue. Natural light comes from a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows that look out on one of the school's two courtyards. Each classroom hallway is equipped with sinks and a countertop. Easily movable furnishings will accommodate student and teacher activities.

The classrooms include windows to the outside of the building and to the hallway so teachers can monitor children in both the room and the hallway.

Each room has accommodations for storage and wireless technology, including the latest in electronic white boards, said Deputy Superintendent Beth Stewart.

All that will be supported by 14 miles of wiring and cabling, said Johnny Sutton, Hydco Inc. construction superintendent at the school.

The commons area is a large space for schoolwide or community events that can be divided by sound-dampening curtains into a separate gymnasium, cafeteria/kitchen, and stage/music room for day-to-day use.

Windows next to the ceiling and a south wall of windows serve to maximize the daylight. The commons can be opened to the public for performances, meetings and athletic events while the rest of the building is made off-limits.

Meadow Park and the other modernized schools will include multiple features to help with student and employee safety, energy savings, durability and easy maintenance, Kiehl said.

Visitors to each new elementary school will enter a vestibule at the front and must pass through the main office to enter the rest of the school. In the event of emergencies, the principal can -- from the office -- lock and unlock doors to selected parts of the building.

Utility systems at the schools will be monitored and controlled from a central location in the district.

Emerging structures

The North Little Rock High School project, a 485,000-square-foot development, will be the most costly of the district's building projects.

The iconic Ole Main building and the relatively new athletic arena will continue to stand, but the rest of the campus is now in different stages of demolition and rebuilding. Concrete walls for the new stadium are rising out of the ground near Main Street. Across the property, toward Pershing Boulevard on the north and Willow Street on the west, a red steel frame has emerged and is growing.

By 2016-17 the campus that now serves 11th- and 12th-graders will be home to as many as 3,000 ninth- through 12th-graders. Classrooms will be in four multistory "learning towers," each with an atrium and a set of learning stairs that can become student seating for large group activities and presentations, Kiehl said.

A "circulation spine" or hallway will connect the towers to each other and to the two-story commons area/cafeteria, which will be on the north side, behind the existing main building, he said.

"That dining area and the circulation spine will all overlook the stadium," he said. "And to the east of the commons area, where the old gym is now, that's where the performing arts piece of the project will be."

The existing music and science buildings that are west of the Ole Main building will be torn down and replaced with food service space and school administration offices. A new gymnasium will be constructed north of the existing arena.

The district is holding school for 1,200 in the midst of the construction, prompting the use of portable buildings and makeshift athletic facilities and parking.

Home football games will be played at War Memorial Stadium for the coming year.

As for parking for the opening of the school year, approximately 250 spaces should be available for high school staff members and students on the recently purchased land between Main and Poplar streets, Rodgers said last week. Another 250 spots should be open by mid-September. A gravel lot on the northwest side of the campus will be ready, and district officials say they will ask city and church organizations for the temporary use of their properties for parking if more space is needed.

Even at the elementary school sites, parking and traffic are issues during construction. In some cases, the old schools will have to be demolished before the parking lots and driveways can be finished for new buildings.

While work on the high school is moving ahead, that is not the case for a new middle school on the site of the existing Lakewood Middle and the high school's East Campus, which is temporarily housing all ninth-graders. The East Campus, formerly Northeast High School, was opened in 1970 and has been the district's newest building.

The district, which is depending on revenue from the millage increase, savings from the operating budget and state aid to pay for all of the projects, did not get approval last year for state funding to help with a new middle school to serve all sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders.

The district learned this month that its request for state funding for a larger middle school cafeteria was disapproved for funding in the 2015-17 biennium. That can still be appealed, and money can be saved from other projects that come in under cost projections.

Gene Hawk, the district's director of facilities management, told the School Board on Thursday that the district's building contingency fund has grown to more than $8 million.

"We're in really good shape," Hawk said.

Besides the DLR Group, other architecture firms working with the district on the different projects are the central Arkansas-based Taggart Architects; Jackson Brown Palculict Architects; and Lewis Architects Engineers. Baldwin & Shell Construction Co., Hydco Inc. and Nabholz Construction Services, also central Arkansas firms, are the construction managers for the different projects.

Rodgers, who just completed his first year as district superintendent, spends more than half of his working hours on construction-related matters.

He said he knows of no other district in the country doing what the North Little Rock district is doing. The results, he said, are structures that are "really student- and instruction-friendly."

Kiehl, who has led DLR's planning efforts for the district since 2009, applauded North Little Rock for its support for a building program of such magnitude.

"Very seldom do school districts have the opportunity to come in and touch every building within its boundaries and make substantial upgrades as North Little Rock is doing," he said.

"So they do have a very unique situation, and the teachers, the students, the administration and all the parents will benefit from this for years to come."

Metro on 07/21/2014