Finish line nears for new Eureka Springs High

Eureka Springs School District Superintendent Curtis Turner talks at the south entrance of the new high school before a recent tour. The school opens Jan. 3.
Eureka Springs School District Superintendent Curtis Turner talks at the south entrance of the new high school before a recent tour. The school opens Jan. 3.

— Without a doubt, the toughest part about building the new Eureka Springs High School is that it’s located in such a hilly place.

“This is not Kansas,” said Charlie Morrison, lead designer at Morrison Architecture, which handled the design of the high school. Morrison’s wife, Laura, was the lead architect for the project.

To the people who planned and built the new Eureka Springs High School, no challenge loomed as large as the terrain itself.

It took months of preparation before construction could get under way, said project manager David Ellingson of Kinco Construction, which built the high school. Work began on the site in June 2011, and it wasn’t until this summer that the school “started to take form.”

“The most challenging, but unique aspect was the site,” Ellingson said. The elevation difference from the top to bottom of the site is an estimated 13 feet to 15 feet. “There’s some retaining walls and a lot of earthwork had to go on. Our site superintendent, Lodie Dixon, did a great job of coordinating the work.”

The new high school is scheduled to open Jan. 3, the first day students come back from their winter vacation. The day before will be a teacher in-service day, and that evening there will be a brief open house for students and parents, during which many will get their first glimpses at the inside of the school.

The district will hold “a full-blown open house” either later in January or in early February, said school district Superintendent Curtis Turner. Right now, the focus is finishing the final touches at the high school and coordinating a move in the middle of a school year.

Although much of the move will occur during the winter vacation, the district is planning to move “things we don’t need” at the old high school before then.

“As with any other project, when you get down toward the end, everybody gets a little antsy,” Turner said. “Our anxiety level’s all rising a little. … But everything is coming together. These guys are winding up. We’re preparing to move, and [teachers and staff] are making provisions to get ready.”

The new Eureka Springs High School was financed by a successful millage vote nearly three years ago. In February 2010, Eureka Springs voters approved a bond issue to fund the $10.7 million construction project through a 1.98-mill property tax increase.

The new high school will replace the current Eureka Springs High School, which has been in use since 1950. The current high school is around 60,000 square feet, according to Turner, while the new one will be close to 80,000 square feet.

ON ‘MAIN STREET’

Every day, students at the new high school will spend plenty of time on “Main Street.”

Main Street is the nickname given by the school’s builders to its expansive primary hallway, which runs from the front door on its north side to the back door on its south side. For those who enter from the front door, which is on the top of the school’s three stories, it’s possible to see the entire length of the school and out the back door, one story below.

Buses will drop off and pick up students at the back door, which is on the middle story. The first thing most of them, and visitors who enter the school from that side, are likely to notice is the Highlanders’ gymnasium, which takes up the school’s bottom level.

Booths and concession stands are on Main Street, overlooking the basketball court. The gymnasium will seat more than 1,200 people, a size that was important to a town like Eureka Springs.

Having a gym that large will allow the school to host regular-season and postseason tournaments, which can draw additional revenue to the school and the community, Turner said.

“Eureka’s a tourist town,” added Morrison, an alumnus of the high school. “That’s our only industry, so bringing people into Eureka was critical for all of us. If we host a tournament, we can bring [1,200 to] 1,500 people into town that are staying in the hotels, eating in restaurants and supporting our economy.”

On the second level, opposite the gymnasium overlook, is the cafeteria. The cafeteria has two sliding garage-style glass doors on its south side that will be opened on good weather days, allowing students to eat their lunches on furniture outside the building. (Like the old high school, the new high school will have a closed-campus policy.)

Opposite the sliding glass doors, on the north side of the cafeteria, is the auditorium, which has a stage and will have 246 chairs, including handicapped-accessible seating. The auditorium can be closed off from the cafeteria, but its seating can also be expanded during performances through the use of temporary bleachers.

“Our arts program is awesome,” Morrison said. “Arts is a big part of Eureka Springs. I don’t think I can give justice to how important it is.”

Turner said one of the things that he often heard during the school’s planning stages was that voters wanted a space that would be available to the community, not just high school students. And so, the auditorium will be open to the community.

No specific agreements have been made as far as use of the auditorium, Turner added, but “we want the community to be able to use the facility.”

“We can’t emphasize [the arts] enough,” Turner said. “It’s an integral part of us. This facility belongs to the people.”

LOOKING AHEAD

Much of the planning for the high school was done with the future in mind.

The high school’s student body is around 200 students in ninth through 12th grades, but the new building was designed to hold up to 250.

An example of that forward-thinking is the locker area on the top floor in a part of the school that comes off Main Street. There may come a day in which students no longer need lockers, Morrison said, because they are using smart devices instead of textbooks. In that case, the space could be walled off and easily converted into an additional classroom.

Similarly, the floors were built using materials intended to save the district thousands of dollars down the road. All the classrooms have linoleum floors, while the hallways have floors that are polished concrete.

Neither of these floors need to be stripped and waxed, an annual expense for many schools.

“That’s always an issue in the summer,” Turner said. “As an administrator, I think this is the best floor you can put in.”

The second floor has four sets of locker rooms, boys and girls lockers for physical education and basketball. It has a business lab with a small room off the side that has a green wall for TV/video production and an art room. The art room is one of the largest classrooms in the high school and includes a new kiln.

The second floor also has the teachers’ lounge, as well as the Environmental and Spatial Technology lab, a technology class that deals with high-tech matters such as robotics. Turner said students will be involved in the development of the landscaping that will be put in around the school.

“We want to integrate, as much as we can, [the plans of] the EAST lab kids,” Turner said. “To me, it makes sense to have the kids do it, to be involved with the master plan. They have already found an area they want to put an amphitheater in, and we’re looking at grants to help that happen.”

The high school’s top floor is where the majority of the classrooms are located, including the science labs and the classroom for students with special needs. The offices are on the top floor, just off the front door, as is the media center.

Like the auditorium, the media center will be used by more than just students.

“When we got the community to back us [in the millage vote], and they did wholeheartedly, we wanted the community to be able to use the facility,” Turner said. “We can lock down the rest of the school and the community can use the media center.”

ALMOST READY

Early in the high school’s planning stages, Morrison said, the possibility was raised of renovating the existing high school.

Those plans were quickly abandoned, as it would have taken “four to five years” to complete the project and would have been more expensive than building a new school.

“It’s in great need of a bulldozer,” Morrison said of the old high school. “You’d have had kids who were under construction their entire life.”

The opening of the high school means that all three of Eureka Springs’ public schools — the elementary, middle and high schools — will be located on a single campus. The new high school will be at 2 Lake Lucerne Road, just south of the middle school.

The current high school is about two miles from the town’s other two public schools.

“It’s wonderful,” Turner said. “We share teachers between the middle school and high school, and now they can just walk from building to building instead of getting in a car and driving across town.

“It will also save on transportation costs. Right now, we’re running buses back and forth each day.”

One of the final hurdles facing the new high school was resolved earlier this month, when the Eureka Springs City Council voted in favor of widening Lake Lucerne Road so it can accommodate two school buses side by side. (The district had previously said it could not pay for repairing a city street, citing a 2004 opinion by then-Attorney General Mike Beebe.)

The laying of asphalt may have to wait a few months, Turner said, but he added that by the time the school opens Jan. 3, he expects Lake Lucerne Road to be wide enough to handle two buses.

“I think the temperature’s going to be a problem,” Turner said. “So what I asked the city to do was widen the road, building up shoulders with materials so buses could run on it, and then come back in the spring and pave it. They approved it.”

Arkansas, Pages 13 on 11/24/2012

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