High schoolers make the move

Bonners Ferry students took a mini-vacation from school part of this week.

Instead of using the three-day break to watch TV or hang with friends, more than 50 students volunteered to come to school. They helped pack boxes and load furniture into U-Hauls. Then they unloaded everything into a brand new high school.

Today, students will return to school for one day before breaking for the holidays. At 8:10 this morning, they’ll hear the new bells ringing through the shiny halls in the district’s first new school in more than 30 years. They’ll watch classmates perform in a talent show on the stage in the new auditorium and they will dedicate a time capsule to be buried outside the new brick building.

“I’m still seriously in a daydream,” said Sarah Henslee, a senior who helped with the move. “I can’t believe this is actually our school.”

Henslee said she’s excited to be part of the first class to graduate from the new high school. Her younger brother – a freshman – will be part of the first class to spend all four years in the new building.

She’s mesmerized by the fancy new gymnasium. The locker rooms are big enough for two teams, she said. A metal door, kind of like a garage door, rolls down to split the locker rooms down the middle.

“They’re huge,” Henslee said. “I would live in them.”

At the same time students were moving from the old high school into the new building, another group was moving stuff from the old junior high into their new home in the 1970s-era high school.

District Maintenance Supervisor Jim Bace said the old junior high looked “more like a convalescent home than a school.” Nearly 50 trains rumbled by the school each day. Instead of a single building, students attended class in portable trailers. They didn’t have lockers, so they had to carry their books with them all day long.

“Our focus has been a lot on that new high school, but there’s equally as much excitement at the junior high,” Superintendent Don Bartling said. Eventually, the sixth-grade will move from the district’s elementaries to join grades 7 and 8 at the old high school.

“This is an event we’ve been looking forward to for over three years,” Bartling said.

Voters approved a $10.6 million plant facilities levy in 2002 for the nearly 100,000-square-foot high school. It has a state-of-the-art gymnasium with four locker rooms and electronic bleachers. Wrestlers have their own practice room over the gym. The 500-seat auditorium has a top-notch sound system, comfy seats and a stage that’s already been host to a professional ballet.

“We have a conference room,” said Ted Reynolds, assistant principal and athletic director. “Every teacher in our building has their own room, so we don’t have any more rovers.”

Reynolds said everything in the new school is an upgrade and improvement on what they’re used to, from the phone system to the new trophy cases in the halls.

“To me, the whole building is just a flat-out awesome building,” he said.

Bace describes the new school as “spectacular.”

“It’s probably the nicest thing Bonners Ferry has ever had,” Bace said. “It’s probably the nicest thing Bonners Ferry will ever have. It’s a castle. It’s the home of the Badgers!”