HOT SPRINGS — Janet Hugo, director of the Arkansas School for Mathematics, Sciences and the Arts, will retire at the end of the school year, but before leaving, she said, she will see the school reach a major accomplishment - one that did not seem possible just a few years ago.
Construction is almost complete on the ASMSA Student Life Complex, which will include residence halls for 250 students, a dining hall and kitchen, student lounge areas, a security office, a school nurse’s office and residential-life staff offices.
“I could stay here for another 10 years and still would not be done with what I would like to see happen here,” Hugo said. “I have no problem at all passing the mantle on for someone new.”
Hugo gave a tour of the new studentlife complex on March 22, and workers were concentrating on the new kitchen area and the footing for the dining area.
“The dining area will connect to the kitchen, and the open space for dining will be used as the student union,” Hugo said pointing out where the new diningarea will go. “The students can stay in the area of the tables and study together or just hang out.”
The dining area is now under construction. Originally, Hugo said, the kitchen and eating area were to be added later because of funding restraints, but additional funds were raised for the complex during construction.
The building will be complete exceptfor the library. Hugo said the project needs an additional $300,000 for the library to be finished. Once done, she said, it will house archives, books and the school’s computer lab.
Hugo said the plans show the library will have a glass-enclosed mezzanine that will extend out over the dining area.
“This is phase 2 of the complex,” she said. “The funds just seem to keep coming, and it keeps us happy that we can get all of this done now.”
The ASMSA Foundation has launched a campaign called “Read … Lead … Succeed” to raise the money needed to complete the library, and school officials hope to have the funds so the work can get done before the 11th- and 12th-grade students move into the complex in August.
The first phase of the complex includes the separate dormitories for male and female students. Hugo walked through the residential areas and showed an example of the rooms.
There will be a room for two students, and they will share a bath with two more students in the next room, she said.
A large dressing area and shower will connect the two rooms. Each student w i l l have a desk, and the dresser drawers can be stacked asfree-standing furniture, or they can be placed under the students’ beds.
“We wanted to give the students some freedom to arrange the rooms like they want them to be - to be able to control their environment.”
There are also eight rooms in the building that are equipped with bathtubs with rails and are modified to meet the standards of the Americans With Disabilities Act, Hugo said.
Some of the students have said they might want to move four of the beds into one sleeping room and have the desks and other furniture in another as a study room, Hugo said.
“Then if someone was up late studying, the others could sleep,” she said.
Each f loor also includes lounge areas, where students can study or gather when the schedule allows. Each will include a good-sized flat-panel television. But Hugo said she expects the television will be used more on the weekends.
“The students don’t watch TV much here,” she said. “It’s a different culture here. On Friday nights, some of the kidswill watch movies on DVD.”
“When the planning began on this building, the architects held a series of discussions with students and faculty about what they wanted. They said they wanted plenty of light, green spaces and lounges where they could hang out together. We have tried to do that. Kids need places to gather.”
As the head of the school led the tour of the new student-life building, she kept finding new walls and new spaces that have been created, along with appliances in the laundry rooms and other new items.
“I am like a little kid at Christmas,” she said. “I am always going, ‘Oh wow,’ over something new. I love this building.”
The f loors will be glazed concrete in some of the public areas, and a woodlike laminate in the hallways of the dorms.
“The building is modern and warm with the wood looks, and the metal that is exposed looks strong,” Hugo said.
She also pointed out that under the lowest f light ofstairs, there is an area of light-gray rounded rocks, for a touch of the natural in the modern building.
With the new student-life building in place, the school will move out of the original 1929 St. Joseph’s Hospital building that has been used as dormitories since the school opened in Hot Springs in 1991.
“That building has hurt recruiting,” Hugo has said before. “I have had parents tell me they loved the academic program of the school but did not want their children to live in a place like the old hospital.”
Some of the classrooms, as well as the computer science and arts areas, will move from the old hospital to the Pine Street Building on the ASMSA campus.
“That also includes admission and the counseling center and some faculty offices,” Hugo said. “Then the city can take down the old hospital. We have to give them six months’ notice to vacate, and that will be when the improvements to the Cedar Street building are done.”
The school is on Whittington Avenue in downtown Hot Springs, just off Central Avenue and less than a mile from Bathhouse Row. There are now 206 students in the school - 113 juniors and 93 seniors, according to information from Hugo’s office.
While the school offers academic challenges far beyond the classes held in most high schools in the state, ASMSA is not a school for the rich and elite, the director said.
The students come from 60 of the 75 counties in Arkansas, and approximately 50 percent of the students come from households with an average income of less than $50,000 for a family of four, she said. “A quarter of the students’ families earn less than $25,000 a year.”
In the class of 2011, 86 students were accepted by 84 colleges and universities, with 65 percent of the class attending in-state colleges and universities. Those students received more than $15 million in scholarship offers, Hugo said.
More than $6 million of the total funding for the student-life project came fromstate grants issued under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and presented to the school by Gov. Mike Beebe.
Hugo also credited many members of the Arkansas General Assembly from around the state for their support of the project’s funding. She also gave special credit to Alan Sugg, former president of the University of Arkansas system, for supporting the project. The two-year high school is operated by the university system.
The new student-life complex will be dedicated in a ceremony on May 24; the day after the students’ academic year is over. Hugo’s last day at the school will be June 31.
Staff writer Wayne Bryan can be reached at (501) 244-4460 or wbryan@arkansasonline.com.
Tri-Lakes, Pages 51 on 03/29/2012