Lawrence School District’s $5 million reconstruction and renovation project that included the high school and middle school is 95 percent complete, according to Superintendent Gary Schall, who guided a reporter through the hallways both buildings last Friday.
Begun last December, the project included the shifting of central office staff and offices to the high school, an expanded main office with more space for the guidance office, meeting space for special education hearings, renovated science classrooms with state-of-the-art equipment, including a fume hood to contain chemicals during experiments.
“This was the first full gut renovation in the history of Lawrence,” Schall said.
At the middle school, which is now called the Broadway Campus as it, houses Lawrence Elementary School grades three through five and the middle school grades sixth through eighth under the district’s realignment plan that includes the Lawrence Early Childhood Center at the Number Four School for pre-K and kindergarten students and Lawrence Primary School at the Number Two School for first- and second-graders.
The district also closed the Number Five School, which is now being leased by the Shulamith School for Girls and instituted a uniform clothing code for students in pre-K to eighth grade. Lawrence’s restructuring applies the Princeton Plan that organizes school districts by grade levels not geography.