Bowdish Moving In With North Pines

Bowdish Junior High seventh- and eighth-graders will rise and shine early next year.

In order to fit the roughly 320 Bowdish students into North Pines Junior High, the two schools will stagger their schedules by one hour. Bowdish kids will start their day at 7:30 a.m., and go home at 2 p.m.

North Pines classes will start at 8:22 a.m. and finish at 2:52 p.m.

This is one of the answers that’s emerged in a massive planning effort to empty Bowdish next year for its renovation. And it’s a particularly helpful one. Staggering class schedules allows for each school to have two separate lunch sessions, separate sports practices. Even to set different hall passing schedules if need be. After all, sending 820 adolescents into the halls all together may be, well, crowded.

Both Dave Bouge, principal at North Pines, and Bob Johnson, acting principal at Bowdish, say they’re pleased with answers they’ve found for the many problems of relocating a school within another school.

It’s the problems they haven’t thought of yet that worry them.

“I’m the one who came up with Option C,” Bouge said, “so I have a fairly vested interest in making this work.”

Johnson calls himself a “captain without a ship.” Next year, at North Pines, he’ll carry the title of associate principal and do the work of principal and assistant principal for Bowdish. He and his office staff will have their own quarters.

Johnson heaved his biggest sigh of relief, he said, when spring registration showed the numbers of his students next fall should actually fit in the 11 classrooms available at North Pines.

The Bowdish students and teachers will use eight classrooms in the western wing of North Pines. Their other three classrooms will be portables, set to the west of the school- one unit now at Bowdish and a new duplex portable that will cost the district about $60,000.

The students ordinarily in those North Pines classes will move to other buildings. Sixth-graders will go to their “home” elementary schools. And special education classes will move to other buildings.

In the main wing of North Pines, two oversize rooms will be divided to create four classrooms.

A few classes will merge. Vocal choir, for instance, has few enough students enrolled that combining the students is a plus. Band activities also will be combined, Johnson said.

Shop and physical education programs will share space but remain separate.

“They have a huge shop - about an acre and a half,” Johnson said.

But other spaces will be shared. The faculty room, for instance. That should lead to teachers from each school sharing their ideas and experiences.

“We don’t get to do much of that in our profession,” Johnson said. “But here we’ll be in their guest bedroom, observing.”

, DataTimes