New school opens in Five Mile

On the first day of school Tuesday, all 550 students at Prairie View Elementary School will be first-timers. The new $16.9 million school at 2606 W. Johannsen Road will open for the first time.

The school, which is not quite completed, will welcome children from kindergarten through the sixth grade. The Mead School District has been rezoned and will get some students from Evergreen Elementary School along with some new students.

The school was built as part of a $37.7 million capital bond voters approved in 2004 to help ease the student population growth in the area.

“I’m looking forward to doing some projects,” said Olivia Sloan, who will soon be in the second grade. She was recently at the school with her brother, Riley, who will start kindergarten, and their mother, Ashley. The two children said they were very excited for their first day.

The family was at the school early to help other parents set up the teachers’ classrooms. Parents and teachers were pushing furniture into place, hanging educational materials on the walls and making sure the students would be greeted with a friendly-looking classroom.

Tara Tucker, the mother of a new first-grader, said she was looking forward to her child spending six years in the new school. She was busy pounding nails into the wall from which to hang lady bugs.

“The structure is amazing,” she said. “The attention to detail is great. I’m anxious, of course, to see it finished.”

Faculty, staff and construction crews are working hard to make sure the building is as complete as possible for the first day of school.

Principal Becky Cooke said that the construction company has been working weekends and nights to finish. The cafeteria wasn’t done as of Aug. 27, but Cooke promised sack lunches for students to eat in their classrooms if it is not completed by Tuesday.

The gymnasium may take a little longer.

Dave Filer, the building superintendent of Northwest Construction, said that the wooden floor can’t be installed until there is less moisture in the concrete beneath it. Until then, the room should be closed off with a door that retracts from the ceiling.

The new school boasts classrooms with lots of natural light. Cooke said the teachers asked for the light when the school was being designed. She added that the overhead lights in the rooms adjust to the outdoor lighting to make the room darker or lighter as needed.

Some classrooms interconnect to make teaching a team project. There are also large instructional pods – atriums in the hallway – where students can participate in messier projects, such soil erosion experiments, or projects that need a lot of space.

The classrooms on the first floor all have doors that open directly to the outside. Cooke said this was a throwback to older school designs.

Another great feature in the classrooms is that there is a single-person bathroom in each.

“The neat thing about it is it makes it feel more like home,” Cooke said. The students can stay in the same area for a bathroom break. Teachers no longer have to hand out hall passes for the students and they don’t have to worry about where the students have gone.

First-grade teacher Kim Leighty said she’d been sitting up at night lately thinking about how to set up her new classroom. She is glad that she’s finally getting a chance to get into the building and is impressed with her new location.

“It’s beautiful,” she said. “It’s kind of breathtaking, actually.”