NEWS

Administration explains construction for main offices at Door 4

Kassi Darnell

December 12, 2019

Starting during winter break, the attendance, student services and the counseling offices at Door 4 will be under construction. In addition, the health center and activities offices will also be under construction. The offices will be moved, expanded and renovated. During construction, the new office at Door 21 will act as a temporary attendance office. Assistant Principal Joseph Schaller said the construction will last until the beginning of the 2020 – 2021 school year.

“This area right here (the current attendance office and nurse’s office) will be done from Christmas to spring break, and this, most of the area (current counseling and student services) will be done from spring break to the start of summer,” Schaller said regarding the changes. “And then for the rest of the summer, the rest will be (finished), assuming everything’s on time, which may or may not happen.”

As the student body has expanded, so has the staff. One of the major reasons for all of the renovations to these main offices is to accommodate the significant amount of new staff that have been hired in recent years.

“We’re creating some additional offices because we have many more counselors than we used to have and social workers and so on and there’s just not enough offices in that area,” Schaller said. “But it creates some additional space for not only the counselors, but they’re also going to have the new college and career readiness area. It’s going to be (where rooms B164 and B165 currently are) completely renovated and looking good for them.”

Rachel Cole, director of counseling, said via email that she is excited about the renovations and that they’re much needed, considering the counseling office is one of the first places seen by new families that come to enroll and the offices were in need of a makeover. In addition, Cole also said she also thinks the renovations will be beneficial for students as well.

“(The offices are being expanded) to support our staff and the needs of our work with conferences, community agencies coming in,” Cole said regarding the renovations. “I think we will be more centrally located and parents and students along with college reps will have more space to meet and not have to walk to other conference rooms.”

Grace Belt
Activities Administration Assistant Karen Hayes checks and writes her emails. In the upcoming construction, she will be staying in the activities office. Hayes said Student Services will be in this office here eventually, so she’ll have three people in there instead of two.

All of the main offices will be temporarily moved to various parts of the building.The counseling office will be moved into media center classrooms one and two as well as the think tank. Offices such as attendance will be located at Door 21 and the health center will be accessed through the main office.

“There’ll be a couple classes in this block area, B164 and B165, that’ll become either a part of counseling or athletics. Those (classrooms) are going to go over into A100. This will end up being reconfigured because student services, they’re going to be moved over here, and the nurse’s office will be moved over (to the current attendance office) once everything is done,” Schaller said in regards to the new layout of the building. “(The nurse’s office) is the only office that will not have to move twice. They won’t have to move and come back. Once this is finished, they’ll just move straight over. We wanted that to be a smooth transition for the health center. They’ll have it easy, so to speak.”

Once construction to the offices at Door 4 are complete, the new offices at Door 21 will not act as attendance offices. When the 2020 – 2021 school year begins, students will have to go to the attendance office at Door 4. The offices at Door 21 will act as a permanent Student Resource Officer (SRO) office and place where staff can allow students into the building through that door. Schaller said those offices are needed now that Door 21 is a permanent entrance and Student Resource Officer DJ Schoeff said that entrance was in need of an SRO office because it is one of the less- monitored building entrance. The new

offices at Door 21 have been built because it is now a permanent entrance into the building.“That’s never been an official entrance for us. We used to lock that door and you had to walk around. But we didn’t think that was good so we started letting kids come in there,” Schaller said. “But that wasn’t good.

So we just have that makeshift desk there with somebody sitting there and we got buzzer added to let people in. But now that’ll be an entrance very similar to our main entrances, like Doors 2, 4 and 13 where you can actually come in and be scanned in.”

Shoeff said that an SRO office would be beneficial to the overall safety of the school.

“Door 21 was an area that we saw was kind of a weakness, if you will, where a presence would be beneficial. (The) natatorium’s there, we have lots of visitors that come in there, and we wanted to make sure we put an office down there for two reasons,” Schoeff said. “Number one, the presence. We’ll have an officer down there as often as we can. And two, the deterrence of walking up and seeing a police officer’s office is right there. It’ll be very beneficial and we plan on putting a nice little sticker on the outside to identify that it’s a police office just as a deterrence.”

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Administration explains construction for main offices at Door 4

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