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WILKES-BARRE —The main goal may have been to show off the newly renovated Mackin school building, but sharp-eyed visitors to a Sunday open house caught the first public glimpse of drawings for Wilkes-Barre Area’s proposed consolidated high school.
The doors to many classrooms on all three floors were wide open from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m., with students and teachers eager to show off the new technology and adaptable room designs of the former elementary school, closed since 2002 before being renovated last year. But the real lure displayed on one small rectangle of the combo cafeteria/auditorium wall: A projector silently showed a series of drawings of the new high school, towering four stories and stretching from Union street to the edge of district-owned property where Coughlin High School now stands.
The first floor looks particularly airy, with the potential for high ceilings. The designs show considerable room for bus loading and unloading near what looks to be a recessed main entrance, affording some weather protection from the other floors extending over it.
Drawings of some of the classrooms show the same V-shaped desks bought for the Mackin building. Separate chairs can be swiveled to either side of the V, allowing the desks to be pointed directly to whatever the teacher decides is the front of the room, or set at an angle while still letting students pivot to face an appropriate direction with desk surface in front of them.
Put four desks corner to corner and you have a student pod that lets them work together. The classrooms in the open house had the new style desks set up in various configurations, showing off the potential.
“I was surprised it worked so well,” math teacher Matt Mill said while showing off his room, with desks arrayed in squares of four. “I was concerned they would talk to each other too much, but that doesn’t happen.”
The desks are light enough that a teacher can quickly have them separated for quizzes and exams, he added.
Certainly the district’s public image was apt to benefit by showing off the new Mackin school with state-of-the-art computerized white boards, Wi-Fi and carts of internet-centric laptop computers in every room. “They have no hard disks,” science teacher Tamara Rogowski said with a grin, showing how quickly the computers started up and were ready for use.
And every teacher asked did not dispute that working in the new environment was better, at least in some ways, than class time at the century-old section of Coughlin High School closed Jan. 4, when ninth and 10th grade students moved to the Mackin building while the two higher grades were restricted to the newer annex section of Coughlin.
But showing off the drawings of the proposed new building, intended to house grade nine through 12 from Meyers and Coughlin high schools on the land where Coughlin currently sits, hinted at another potential benefit of Sunday’s open house: Parents and students could get an idea of what the new school will offer, improving support for the controversial consolidation, estimated at a cost as high as $100 million.
Asked if that had been a goal of the open house, Superintendent Bernard Prevuznak demurred, saying only that, despite push back from those who want to maintain the district’s three-high school system, “it will all work out in the end.”
Rogowski enthused about results of applying the new technology to her digital-native students. Use of the laptops interacting with the computerized Promethean white board has increased student participation dramatically, she said. And because all the work she and the students do on the computers automatically saves to internet-based cloud storage through Google Drive, the work can be accessed at home or even on the smart phone, with no risk of getting lost.
Quizzes can be made and taken via the computers, meaning they can be customized easily for learning-disabled students. The system can be set up so students can “ghost” some computerized lessons, practicing things already done in class again and again once the final bell sounds.
Rogowski said she can send electronic reminders to students about assignments or upcoming tests that go directly to their phones — and has done so — and that parents can sign up for the same messages — sometimes delivered three times: at the end of school, at 6 p.m. and again in the morning before school starts.
Without being asked if the open house could win people over to the idea of the new high school, Rogowski offered her opinion.
“This is a preview of where we’re going. If this is what we can expect, it’s a great future for the students.”
