On Saturday morning, dozens of families wandered through the long, sunlit hallways of Pinnacle View Middle School, admiring the spaces where their 'tweens will learn, create and play in the upcoming school year.
"We are living the dream here," Principal Jay Pickering said from the 2,500-square-foot stage overlooking a cafeteria lit by landscape windows and modern-style hanging circular lamps.
The school -- a sleek, half-mile-long former warehouse with a black-brick and tinted-glass exterior at 5701 Ranch Drive -- will serve almost 600 sixth- and seventh-graders this year from Roberts, Fulbright and Terry elementary attendance zones in northwest Little Rock.
It has a capacity of more than 1,200 students and will have about 900 students once it expands to include eighth grade in 2018-19, Pickering said.
Pinnacle View first welcomed students in 2016 with 220 sixth-graders in the building next door -- a three-story, angular office building that previously served as headquarters for Leisure Arts, a craft-manual publishing company.
Michael Ivanovsky, whose daughter Rebecca Ivanovsky is a rising seventh-grader at Pinnacle View, said he always thought the warehouse looked like a CIA building amid the the green hills near Pinnacle Mountain.
"They turned it into this incredible, incredible space," Ivanovsky said. "The old schools have this very dark, pressing atmosphere, so when there's something new and modern and there's lots of lights, it gives you the idea of freedom and creativity."
Architecture firms Witsell Evans and Rasco and Herron Horton converted the two-story, 200,000-square-foot building in less than a year. It now boasts 46 standard classrooms as well as two sensory rooms, a physical and occupational therapy center, an environmental and spatial technology lab, a gym that can accommodate 1,400 students, three art rooms, and studios for band, choir, drama and dance.
There are also three project-based classrooms -- wide rooms with exercise balls, group tables and interactive whiteboards for students to work on tasks together outside of class.
"It's like a think tank for kids," said Amy Bell, a spokesman for Pinnacle View Parent Teacher Student Association.
Bell said the process for designing the school also encouraged collaboration. The sixth-grade students voted on the school's mascot and colors -- they're the Sky Hawks, and the building's interior is accented with cobalt blue and bright green.
"Everything has been community-based and involved, so that's been a real benefit because the kids feel like it's theirs," she said.
Bell said the new school filled a need for northwest Little Rock's expanding population. Students moving up from the zone's elementary schools were previously sent to middle and high schools outside the area.
For some students, including Rebecca Ivanovsky and her friends, the school is within walking distance from home.
The school's new location opens about a month before the Sept. 13 trial date in a federal court case alleging intentional racial discrimination in regard to the Little Rock School District's buildings and programs.
The case's plaintiffs cited Pinnacle View as well as Forest Heights STEM Academy and Little Rock Central High School as examples of schools that have a higher proportion of whites and have had a higher district priority over schools such as McClellan High School and Henderson Middle School, which have nearly all black enrollments.
The case comes at a time when the state-controlled Little Rock district is seeking to raise money for construction of a high school to replace McClellan and J.A. Fair high schools in southwest Little Rock and make improvements to roofs, windows and heating and air conditioning systems at other campuses.
"We are in full support of every other part of the city having their buildings remodeled to this kind of caliber, which is what everyone wants," Bell said. "If we can provide this for all of Little Rock ... we all get to partake in something that accelerates our learning."
Metro on 08/06/2017