[ngg_images gallery_ids=”527″ display_type=”ds-nextgen_royalslider”]
School is starting for students at the new Stafford High School on Monday.
Potomac Local got a tour of the new facility from Felix Addo, a school administrator, and Valerie Cottongim, a spokeswoman for Stafford County Public Schools.
Many areas in the school were completed and given temporary occupancy, but when Potomac Local toured the school, areas including the cafeteria were not yet completed.
The three-level building is colored coded with the school’s colors – blue, yellow and white – as a way to help students quickly recognize what area of the school they’re in, according to Cottongim.
Small alcoves are located on each floor for teachers to use for recreation and group work. And there are several career and technical related facilities on-site, including a culinary area, a photography dark room, a newsroom, an emergency services room and an automotive shop.
One big difference between the old and new facility is the usage of classroom space, according to Cottongim.
“One of the ways to make better use of the classrooms and ensure that classrooms are being used every block or every period, is that every teacher will have a space in a teacher planning area. So for the periods that they don’t have a class to teach, they can come in and work on planning, meet with their students, meet with their peers,” Cottongim said.
Potomac Local spoke with several teachers at Stafford High School that were preparing their classrooms, including James Andrews – an English teacher starting his 50th year at the school – and Judy Rossi, a chemistry teacher and science department chair.
Rossi stated that there were several upgrades in her science classrooms at the new high school.
“It’s really nice to have the added safety feature with the hood, where I can work on the backside and the kids can still view it on the front side,” said Rossi.
One concern that some students and parents had, was what would be done about the week delay for the Stafford High School students.
“We won’t tack on the extra week at the end. What we will do is see if we have any options for making up the time – whether it’s a waiver from the state. It might involve, if we have to make up the time, adding time at the beginning of the day in the first semester…if we have a nice, mild winter we already have built in time we can use for that,” said Cottongim.
And more features could be added to the site in the future, including an outdoor rooftop science lab, according to Cottongim.
