Future is bright - and colorful - at new Harding

The new elementary building opens Monday, with public tours set for Oct. 31.
By NORMAN LEIGH
VINDICATOR EDUCATION WRITER
YOUNGSTOWN -- Harding Elementary pupils and their teachers will be traveling through time next week.
Come Monday, they'll be leaving the moldy 1911 school that's been their temporary learning base for months and will be walking into a new 21st century school.
The pupils had been attending classes classes at the former Jefferson Elementary School in Brier Hill. They were transferred to Jefferson when the old Harding school was razed.
Harding is the second school to be completed as part of the district's $200 million rebuilding and renovation project that entails constructing 12 new schools and renovating three others.
The new $7.8 million Harding is near the intersection of Cordova and Benita avenues on the city's North Side.
Teachers and other staff members have been busy for days preparing for the debut of the 59,000-square-foot building that will house about 485 kindergarten-through-fourth-graders.
A look inside
"I love the colors, the brightness, the big wide halls," said reading teacher Genevieve Bodnar. "It's cheery. It's very welcoming."
Primary colors -- red, yellow and blue -- are splashed on walls, floors and structural features. Giant models of crayons stand sentinel in the school entryway.
"I call this the John Deere room," Tony DeNiro, director of school business affairs, said as he led a visitor into Harding's gym and pointed out the bright green and yellow paint, similar in tone to the trademark colors used by Deere tractors and farm equipment.
Though Harding is about the same size as the new Taft Elementary, which opened on the South Side in September, that's where the likeness ends.
Each school has its own look. "We were never in favor of cookie-cutter schools," DeNiro said. "We wanted buildings that fit into the community and that are different."
Preserving the past
Where possible, the school district also is trying to preserve a bit of the past in each new structure.
In the hall near the Harding entrance is a drinking fountain fashioned from pale green ceramic tile. The fixture was in the old Harding, having been placed there decades ago as a memorial to an early 20th century educator, Margaret Turner McGeehan.
School officials even repaired the fountain when they reinstalled it, DeNiro pointed out.
Though pupils will see the new school Monday, the public will have to wait a few more days. An open house is set from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. Oct. 31.
It will be about another year before the next new city school is completed. The new West Elementary being built on Schenley Avenue is slated to open in fall 2005, DeNiro said.
leigh@vindy.com