Boardman ready to lose temporary classroom trailers

By DENISE DICK

denise_dick@vindy.com

BOARDMAN

Temporary is a relative

term when talking about trailer classrooms at two township elementary schools.

A pile of wooden rubble was all that remained of the two classroom trailers behind Stadium Drive Elementary School this week, and the four at Robinwood Lane Elementary are destined for a similar fate.

The trailers were installed at both schools in the 1960s intended as temporary classroom space.

“They ended up being there for 40 years,” said Don Robinson, Robinwood’s principal.

Last fall, though, the school district started an expansion plan to add classrooms at both schools. Beginning in the 2010-11 school year, all the students at both schools will be housed inside the schools.

Money to pay for the work — about $2.6 million at Robinwood and roughly $2.8 million at Stadium Drive — is part of nearly $6 million the school board is borrowing with plans to repay over 30 years.

After voters rejected an issue in 2005 that would have allowed the district to borrow $51.5 million through the sale of bonds for building improvements, the district opted for a different plan.

In May 2008, the board voted to instead pursue the 30-year loan and to use a portion of the money from a capital improvement levy renewed in 2007 to repay the debt.

Some 14,163 square feet is being added at Robinwood and 12,582 square feet at Stadium Drive.

Getting rid of the trailers is not only a convenience, it’s a safety issue, say Robinson and Jim Goske, principal at Stadium Drive.

Besides eliminating the trailers, the expansions will provide room for other classes.

Title I teachers’ desks lines a wall at Robinwood because there isn’t classroom space for them. At Stadium, an intervention teacher instructs a small group of students at a table in the hallway for the same reason.

At both schools, music and art teachers transport their materials from classroom to classroom on a cart because there isn’t space for those areas.

That will change with the additions.

Each school will have separate music and art classrooms as well as spaces for intervention and Title I.

Linda Smreck, a music teacher at Stadium, looks forward to the change.

“I’ll actually be able to teach music the way it’s supposed to be taught,” she said. “We’ll be able to have musical instruments in the classroom.”

The Robinwood project also adds three third-grade classrooms, a multiple disabilities classroom, speech/guidance room, English-as-a-second-language room, Title 1 tutors room and handicapped-accessible rest rooms.

For Stadium, expansion means two new kindergarten classrooms, two special-needs classrooms, a reading room, speech room, computer laboratory/technical center and a library/media center.

Stadium’s new library will be named the Evelyn and Theodore Chengelis library after the late parents of 1973 Boardman High School graduate Dr. James Chengelis.

Dr. Chengelis, a Boston physician, donated money for the library. He said it’s a way to give back to the school he attended and to honor his parents.

His parents instilled in him as a child the importance of reading, he added.

Robinwood also will get 40 new parking spots, and Stadium Drive’s addition will allow a separation between parents picking up and dropping off their children and where the buses load and unload.