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Salt Lake City's Beacon Heights Elementary School is one of two new
schools on the east side. (Trent Nelson/The Salt Lake Tribune)
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Dang
it.
If 14-year-old Lily Ratliff had been born just a bit later, she
could have been a student at Salt Lake City's new Beacon Heights
Elementary School.
Unfortunately, because she entered the world earlier, Lily, standing
under the skylight near Beacon's main entrance during a visit Thursday,
can only enjoy the art-covered hallways when she visits her two sisters,
who attend Beacon, and her mom, who teaches there.
I'm kinda mad that I'm not three years younger, said Lily, now at
Wasatch Junior High.
No wonder. On Wednesday, students at Beacon and Salt Lake City
district's other new elementary school, Dilworth, will be treated to $8
million facilities with brighter classrooms, bigger and better
restrooms, and freshly landscaped playgrounds.
Steven Divver, an 11-year-old at Dilworth, also beams, but for a
different reason.
I'm in the sixth grade and I'll get to be in the first class to
graduate from this school, he said proudly.
Those pupils join hundreds who will soon enter a handful of
fledgling northern Utah schools.
For example, district officials say Jordan will open two elementary
schools this year and four schools next year (one elementary,
two middle and one applied technology).
Granite plans to open one elementary this year; Murray won't open a
new school this year or next.
Davis has scheduled the opening of a new elementary school this
year, along with rebuilding a high school and junior high next year. And
Alpine will have two new elementary schools and one new middle school
this year, but has no new ones on tap for 2005-06.
New schools are always exciting for kids, parents, teachers and
administrators, said Dilworth Principal David Roberts.
We're so impressed with the building, he said of the 550-student
facility that replaced one that had stood since the late 1940s. When you
walk in, it's a place you want to be. It's a dream the community's had
for a while.
Part of that dream is due to the final resolution of an acrimonious
period last year that followed the shutting down of Rosslyn Heights and
Lowell elementary schools. District officials eliminated them because of
declining enrollment. Many children then transferred to Dilworth and
Beacon.
We're a community again, said Shannon Orr, a mother of three girls
age 9 and under, who serves on her school community council. Those
closures were ugly and hard.
But
now everyone's recovered.
Perhaps accelerating the healing process will be the state-of-the
art structures now housing Dilworth and Beacon.
Sitting at 1953 S. 2100 East, the 70,000-square-foot Dilworth
Elementary features playgrounds galore - tennis courts, two baseball
fields, a wood-chip-covered exercise area, basketball courts and
hopscotch. Inside, the front hall opens into a sunlit atrium dominated
by a ramp leading to the second floor.
The school purposely caters to about 40 additional students with
physical disabilities, said Claudia Seeley, who oversees building design
for the Salt Lake district. That ramp enables most of those students to
move about the building with relative ease.
Beacon, too, ultimately will help integrate disabled children -
particularly those with behavioral problems - into more mainstream
environments, said special-ed teacher Kris Lancaster-Grant.
What we're so excited about here is that now we have access to a
regular curriculum, said Grant, who has worked with handicapped kids for
nearly two decades. We've never had a library. We've never had a
computer lab. We've always been so isolated.
Therapy of another kind also will be virtually ubiquitous at Beacon
Heights, at 1850 S. 2500 East, said Principal Carol Lubomudrov.
In addition to mammoth tile murals created by teachers and students
on both floors, outside each classroom door will be a tile replica of a
well-known work of art, by such artists as French postimpressionist
painter Paul Gauguin, said Emily Mortensen, a pre-kindergarten teacher.
Like Dilworth, Beacon also will house about 550 students, plus
roughly 40 special-needs pupils, Seeley said. The school will cover
74,000 square feet and replaces the original school dating back to the
early 1950s.
Both schools are part of a $135 million, 32-school construction
project approved by Salt Lake City School District voters in 1999,
Seeley said. By 2009, 28 elementary and four middle schools will have
been reconstructed or retrofitted.
mcronin@sltrib.com |