New school prepares to be envy of the district

Forest Ridge Elementary School will open its doors to custom features such as an acoustic "story castle'' for reading aloud, a food lab and special observation areas in some rooms with one-way mirrors for viewing students.

By BARBARA BEHRENDT

© St. Petersburg Times, published August 6, 2000

BEVERLY HILLS -- It was almost as if Renna Jablonskis was rediscovering her teaching roots.

As she walked from one room to another at the new Forest Ridge Elementary School, navigating through the hallways still layered with construction dust, she happily greeted the workers carrying drills, ladders and pallets of brand new computers.

And just as a teacher asks a child if she has finished her worksheet, Jablonskis gently asked the crews about their progress.

Just a couple of weeks before the opening of the district's newest school, Principal Jablonskis was anxious that everything be ready when more than 600 eager and excited children arrive on the first day of school Aug. 14.

All around, construction workers painted, installed windows and finished floors. School district workers delivered truckloads of furnishings and supplies.

Side by side in the large cafetorium, computers were stacked in one pile, toilet paper in another. Kitchen appliances were still in their crates while plastic bags with rocking chairs sat nearby.

While sorting out the huge room full of materials seemed like a daunting task, Jablonskis, formerly the principal at Pleasant Grove Elementary, said all would be ready when the time came.

Designed after one of the state's prototype schools, the $8.5-million building has custom features that would likely be the envy of many other schools in the district. The red-brick building features columns out front, preferred to some of the more modern options that could have been chosen for the school, she said.

The school has a capacity of 825 but only about 600 were projected to attend classes there at the time the School Board accepted attendance boundaries late last year. Jablonskis said the enrollment list tops 635 students.

Loaded with storage space, the school offers the option of converting that space into instructional areas. Partitions between rooms allow flexible instruction, while outside areas have been provided off the art room and other rooms so students can go outside for projects.

At the school's heart is a special place Jablonskis calls the "story castle." A spacious room behind the cafetorium stage holds a child-sized round reading circle. On the carpet, dusty footprints track into the center and back out show that people in the school, including some members of the construction crew, have discovered the circle's secret.

Standing in the center and speaking softly, the special acoustics bring a person's voice right back to them. For youngsters, it means they can read out loud and not only will those seated around hear their small voices, but they will hear themselves clearly.

There they will read to one another, practice theater-in-the-round and watch puppet shows.

"That's the castle," Jablonskis said. "I love the castle."

The cafetorium has a partition that allows flexibility such as having students arriving early for the school's day care program to be on one side, while those picking up breakfast are on the other.

The stage is large and open on the sides as well as the front. And directly beside the stage is the music room so students involved in performances can be close.

The large media center has five classroom areas set off from the main center. One is a story room, another designed for research.

There are plenty of child-friendly features, too.

Kindergarteners will learn to follow red. The floor has been tiled in different colors to help guide students to the quadrant of the structure where they must go. Red is for kindergarten, green for first, second and third grade, and blue for fourth and fifth.

"This follows all the way through," Jablonskis said, gesturing down the long hallway ahead toward the area where kindergarten students will attend class.

Kindergarten, first and second graders will get to learn about cooking and work on food-related projects in a special lab.

Each classroom has its own restroom and telephone and large storage areas. Each of the school's four quadrants also has a large storage room. The school has just one set of group rest rooms near the school cafeteria, a real safety plus, she said.

As Jablonskis showed off the spacious rooms for the Exceptional Student Education programs, she explained that each was designed to be large enough to be converted in case of a space crunch. If that happened, the store rooms can provide classrooms for small groups of students.

The school will provide for a number of the district's students with extreme needs such as autistic children. "We're going to be a kind of magnet for the high-needs students," she explained.

Some classrooms are outfitted with special observation areas either behind windows or one-way mirrors for viewing students.

The school will also house the Even Start program, a federal program that promotes parent literacy. To accommodate the program, there is a space for babies and their cribs and also a classroom where parents can study to take their General Education Development test or take parenting courses.

The school's day care program also has an office.

Other innovations are also proposed for the school, including a two-room connected suite where one group of fifth graders will be on a block schedule similar to what they will find in some middle and all three of the county's high schools.

There are still some areas of the school that require a little more work. The covered play area was still unfinished, but that was largely because of rain. "We wanted them to focus on the classrooms," she said. "That was the priority." And those areas were largely done in time for school staff to prepare for the student onslaught.

Even her own office still had folding tables for furniture in the weeks leading up to opening. But the important school mascot, a porcelain owl, was already resting on its shelf in her forest-themed, leafy-green bordered office area.

Jablonskis credited the committees that worked on the school's design and details for such a good outcome.

"Each person looked at the school and looked at the plan," she said. That meant answering questions such as how a teacher in a particular room might like to see his or her electrical plugs arranged so the floor wouldn't have to be criss-crossed with cords. The solution was to put plugs in the center of rooms so there was easy access. Those access points also allow computers in computer labs direct access into the school's network.

Asking those questions from one end of the school to the other meant that the final outcome is a very comfortable school environment, she said.

Of course planning on paper is one thing, but actually seeing the finished product and how it works is something else. Not everything turned out exactly as expected.

"The front entrance was twice as big as what we thought it would be," Jablonskis said. "It was a surprise, but a pleasant surprise."

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