The four public school districts in Pulaski County are in one stage or another of planning and building what district leaders intend to be state-of-the-art campuses for ninth- through 12th-graders.
Each of the districts -- Little Rock, North Little Rock, Pulaski County Special and the new Jacksonville/North Pulaski -- is also working to replace or expand elementary and middle schools.
North Little Rock voters passed a 7.4-mill school property tax increase on Feb. 14, 2012. That kicked off a $265.5 million capital construction program -- the largest the state has seen for schools. That has produced nine new or extensively remodeled elementary schools, a prekindergarten center and a nearly 500,000-square-foot high school that is built into the side of the hill that is still topped by the Ole Main High School building.
The construction was far enough along this school year that North Little Rock students in grades nine, 11 and 12 were able to use parts of the expansive new building.
The 10th-grade classrooms that were kept in the nearby Poplar Street School are now being moved into the new building in preparation for the 2016-17 school year. At the same time, construction crews are also working to finish a performing arts center with a 1,000-seat auditorium, a 2½-court gymnasium with an elevated track around its perimeter, and the school's main entryway.
Superintendent Kelly Rodgers said last week that he expects all of the work on the $92.5 million high school project -- $110 million when furnishings are included -- to be completed by mid-September.
"I can't express my excitement in being able to offer the students, parents and community such a state-of-the-art building," Rodgers said.
The building can hold as many as 3,000 students and will enable the district to expand its curriculum and provide the technology and education that will meet the needs of students now and well into the future, he said.
"The size of the building and its configuration have afforded us with the ability to come up with creative ways to deliver programs to our students," Rodgers said, citing as an example the district's proposed conversion charter school. That proposed school within a school -- awaiting state approval -- would focus on preparing students for careers in manufacturing, transportation and logistics.
The high school projects in North Little Rock's three sister districts have yet to come out of the ground, but their planners are targeting the 2018-19 and 2019-20 academic years to open the new schools' doors. Those projects and the approximate size, cost and capacity are:
• A new $50 million, 154,000-square-foot high school for 750 students to replace Wilbur Mills High in 2018-19 in the Pulaski County Special district.
• A new $60 million high school of more than 260,000 square feet for 1,300 students, with room to grow, that will replace the Jacksonville High campus in the new Jacksonville/North Pulaski School District in 2019-20.
• A new school on Richsmith Lane in southwest Little Rock, tentatively set to open in 2019-20, to possibly replace both McClellan and J.A. Fair high schools, which serve a combined 1,700 students in the Little Rock School District.
In North Little Rock, Ole Main at Main and 22nd streets will eventually become the district's administrative headquarters.
But directly behind that landmark building -- to its north -- is the new building that will serve as the city's sole traditional public high school. Among new schools in the state, it is one of the largest -- if not the largest.
In comparison, the Bentonville School District's new West High School has 376,898 square feet with a 56,992-square-foot indoor athletic complex. The two-story school, with a capacity for 2,250 students, cost $69 million to construct, Paul Wallace, the district's facilities director, said last week.
North Little Rock High
A brisk tour of North Little Rock High School's brick, metal and glass campus -- with its graphic wall designs, polished concrete floors and different kinds of retractable doors and walls -- took well over an hour.
Rodgers, who has just completed his third year as superintendent after spending much of his career in Texas, said there will be an open house for the public when all of the construction is completed.
In the new building is a new, large kitchen and multiple gleaming stainless-steel serving lines for the high school.
Adjacent to the kitchen is the two-story dining area that is the width of a football field and can serve up to 900 students at a time. Its north wall of windows looks onto the end zone of the new football stadium, with the Park Hill section of North Little Rock in the distance.
To the east of the dining and kitchen areas -- in a space near the Main and 22nd Street intersection -- is the still-to-be-completed performing arts center with a black-box theater and an auditorium with balcony seating, an orchestra pit, a catwalk and a three-story-high stage space. Choir, band and stagecraft space is also included.
On the west side of the campus, close to what will be the school's main entrance on 22nd Street, is a new gymnasium that is connected to the existing North Little Rock High arena.
Four multistory academic towers also are on the the west side of the campus, stretching to the north toward Pershing Boulevard. The school's main corridor links one tower to the next. The corridor's east wall of windows looks out on the back of the home-side stands, track and football field.
Wide hallways of classrooms, laboratories and student collaboration spaces in each tower run perpendicular to the main corridor.
Each multistory tower features a centrally located, wide set of wood-covered "learning stairs," on which groups of students can sit to listen to speakers or watch demonstrations.
The learning stairs, which are bordered with more traditional stairs for moving from floor to floor, are just one type of "common area" in the school. There are also lounge areas furnished with modular upholstered couches and chairs. Students sitting on stools can go to common-area counters that overlook the staircases. Television screens, cameras and sound systems are part of the equipment in the common areas as well as inside classrooms.
The towers have themes -- Tower D will have a concentration of ninth-grade classes. It also houses the two-story media center. Army ROTC and special-education classes are also in the tower, Deputy Superintendent Beth Stewart said.
Tower C is home to the STEM subjects -- science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Each of eight science laboratories is shared by two classrooms, Stewart said. Towers A and B feature the humanities courses. The lowest level of Tower A is a parking garage.
The school also features Environmental and Spatial Technology labs, and television production classrooms and a studio. The consumer science classroom is equipped with multiple kitchen cubicles. The medical professions area is set up like a clinic with a waiting room, classrooms and hospital beds. Students can earn credentials to be certified nursing assistants or pharmacy technicians.
"It's got a lot of bells and whistles in it," North Little Rock High Principal Randy Rutherford said about the school, which has about 150 faculty members and approximately 135 classrooms. "It is a large building, built almost like a small college."
The spaces for larger groups of students to hear speakers and the enhanced technology resources are "all win-wins for our kids," he said.
Pulaski County Special School District
Work has begun this spring to put artificial turf on the Mills High School and Robinson High School football fields. That is so the fields can withstand the abuse of serving as practice and playing fields for student athletes and band members while school construction projects go on around them, Derek Scott, the Pulaski County district's executive director of operations, said last week.
The district plans to build a new high school behind Fuller Middle School on Dixon Road in southeast Pulaski County. The entrance to the school will be where the high school baseball field is now, Scott said. When the school is completed, what is now Fuller Middle School will be moved to the current Mills High building, also on Dixon Road. The current Fuller Middle School building will be demolished to make way for high school parking.
Preliminary drawings for the school show a two-story entryway with a curving staircase and four classroom wings. Two gymnasiums, an auditorium and a large cafeteria are part of the plan. A lot of glass and natural light will be features of the school, which is being designed for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design certification, Scott said.
At the Robinson Middle and High school complex on Arkansas 10, the plans are a bit more complicated and will be happening at the same time as the work at Mills.
The first two wings of Robinson Middle School will be enclosed and will become a ninth-grade-only campus, pulling the freshmen classes from the existing ninth-through-12th-grade Robinson High, Scott said.
The back, or third-level, wing of Robinson Middle School will be demolished to allow for building a new 150,000-square-foot, sixth-through-eighth-grade school into the hill at the back of the property at a cost of about $40 million. The third floor of the three-story building will be solely for sixth-graders.
The Pulaski County Special district is also taking immediate steps to address overcrowding at Sylvan Hills High School in Sherwood. The ninth-grade class at the school will be housed starting with the upcoming 2016-17 school year at the vacated but spruced up Northwood School campus, Scott said. That new Sylvan Hills Freshman Academy will serve about 450 students to start.
Space at Sylvan Hills High will be renovated to house a Community Based Instruction program that teaches living skills to disabled students in the Sherwood area. The district is losing its existing Community Based Instruction space at North Pulaski High School, which is becoming part of the new Jacksonville/North Pulaski School District.
The Pulaski County Special district is using money from second lien bond issues and savings to finance the construction projects.
Jacksonville/North Pulaski School District
Voters in the new Jacksonville/North Pulaski district approved a 7.6-mill tax increase earlier this year for the construction of a new high school, a new elementary school to replace Tolleson and Arnold Drive elementaries, and to add multipurpose rooms to Pinewood, Bayou Meto, Murrell Taylor and Warren Dupree elementaries.
An approximately $60 million high school for 1,300 students in grades nine through 12 will be built on the site of the vacant Jacksonville North and South middle schools. Demolition of the old schools is scheduled for Aug. 15, Superintendent Tony Wood said Friday.
The plan is for the high school to open in 2019 and the new elementary school to open in 2018. But much of the district's planning hinges on receiving more than $30 million in Arkansas Facilities Partnership Program money, Wood said. The district won't know whether it will get the money until after the Legislature appropriates funding for the state building program in early 2017.
Little Rock School District
The Little Rock district is in the planning stages for its new high school on undeveloped land in southwest Little Rock, Superintendent Baker Kurrus said Friday.
"What we are doing is reverse-engineering the building to fit the academic program that we think will serve the community," Kurrus said. "We have a series of decisions -- so-called critical path decisions -- we are making to move the planning along. We are looking at academies and career tracks similar to what we have been doing, especially at McClellan and Fair. The new school has to accommodate those programs, and we may expand those."
Polk Stanley Wilcox is the architect for the project, which is to start coming out of the ground in the summer of 2017. The target date for opening is the 2019-20 school year.
A Section on 05/31/2016