Timberlake To Open This Fall Some Students Reluctant To Leave Lakeland Friends For Brand-New $7.6 Million State-Of-The-Art School
At first, Craig Craviotto didn’t want to go to the new Timberlake school despite its sparkling gymnasiums, high-tech classrooms and pleasing color scheme.
About 600 seventh- through 12th-graders will attend the $7.6 million, 106,000-square-foot combined juniorsenior high school this fall.
For many, it’ll be the first time they’ll have been away from classmates at Lakeland Junior and Senior High School in years.
“I just didn’t want to move,” said Craviotto, 16, who will be a senior at Timberlake this fall. “You’ve been with these people since seventh grade. It’s a long time to go to have them there and then they’re not.”
Construction began on Timberlake in spring 1997 following approval of an $8.6 million bond in October 1996.
The new school is needed, Lakeland district administrators say, because the district’s enrollment has grown about 4 percent or 5 percent annually for several years.
Unlike the Lakeland school, which was built in 1980, Timberlake has two gymnasiums, a pitched roof and a state-of-the-art energy and heating system hidden in catwalks above false ceilings.
Pillars surround the entrances, with similar columns supporting the library’s vaulted ceiling. Students will eat lunch and attend assemblies in a large commons room with a stage and blue and cream tiled floor. Windows in some of the administrative offices face into the large room.
“Oh, boy,” Timberlake Principal Van Tuinstra said of the differences between the new school and the aging Lakeland school. “They’re supposed to be as equal and as parallel as they can be.”
But with educational innovations and more stringent building codes enacted during the last two decades, the schools could not be the same, Tuinstra said.
“This year, Timberlake starts offering some things that Lakeland took years to get,” he said.
Bowing to parents’ concerns, administrators and architects designed wings to separate junior and senior high school students. Even the commons area can be divided by a movable wall.
“There’s quite a gap in maturity between seventh-graders, who are 11 or 12, and a 12th-grader at 18,” Tuinstra said.
Timberlake also has an athletic wing and a vocational section where industrial technology, graphics, health occupations and business classes will be taught.
“This school is ahead of the curve,” said architect Gordon Longwell, whose Hayden Lake, Idaho, firm designed Timberlake and many other North Idaho schools. “We feel very proud of being cost-conscious. We feel we’ve gotten a lot for the money.”
Lake City High School in Coeur d’Alene cost $15.1 million to build in 1994, and the new high school in Post Falls is expected to have a nearly $18 million price tag.
Despite the amenities of the new school, Timberlake students say they’ll miss their friends at Lakeland.
“It’ll be weird not having prom and stuff together,” said 16-year-old Leah Street, who will be a senior at Timberlake in the fall. “And graduation - that’ll be a lot different. We’d always thought we’d be together for that.”