In its final stages of construction, Building 17 gazes across the Pine View campus. The building will be open come second semester. PHOTO BY FELICITY CHANG
The loss of the long wooden fence surrounding construction on campus will be a dramatic change to Pine View’s landscape, but it will come with an even bigger one: the official opening of Building 17. The new building has enough classrooms that every teacher who is currently in a portable will be able to move to a brick-and-mortar room by the end of winter break, and some of the new classrooms have unique characteristics that are unseen elsewhere on the Pine View campus.
At first glance, many teachers’ new classroom assignments might seem random and unnecessarily complicated. Some teachers who are already in physical buildings are assigned to move to Building 17, leaving their classroom open for somebody else to move into. Meanwhile, some middle school classes currently held in portables will not be moving to Building 17, instead occupying vacancies left by teachers in other buildings. However, this new layout was designed very strategically.
“My whole thing was that I had a real issue putting younger students like my sixth-graders and even some seventh-graders on the third floor of a large building. They’re still young, they’re still smaller in stature, so that’s why we had to make the decision [to move teachers out of the physical buildings], because I didn’t have enough people to put in those third floor classrooms,” Assistant Principal Melissa Abela said.
Inside the building, teachers from similar departments are located near each other to make collaboration easy. The second and third floors are very similar in layout to each other, and all the specialized rooms are located on the bottom floor.
The choir room’s current location in Building 16 is plagued by bad acoustics, tight space, and long walks. In Building 17, it will be a completely different story.
“They actually have acoustical tiles in the room to help dampen sound, and if there was no carpet in the room, it would be very what we call live or very echoey,” choir teacher Seth Gardner said. “Outside of the carpet, there is some sound absorbers and there’s extra reinforcement between the rooms so that there’s less sound bleed. The other thing is that with my room specifically, they built it so it was not under another room.”
Boxes full of furniture are being moved into Building 17. All
classrooms will have 25 student desks, and teachers will arrange
their rooms over winter break. PHOTO BY FELICITY CHANG
Project manager Nathan Renner looks across a physics classroom during an October tour. PHOTO BY ALYSON MIZANIN
Physics teachers Malele Nzeza and Roger Siegel are moving into new rooms as well. The physics rooms have ample storage space, but perhaps their most unique feature is their ceilings, or rather, their absences of ceilings. All the pipes and beams are exposed to give physics students a firsthand look at the composition of a building every day during their lessons.
“Because of the way the ceiling is, there will be more experiments that we’ll be able to do. We’ll be able to hang things that are heavy [and there is room] for people to get more equipment because there is more storage now,” Nzeza said.
The integration of Building 17 into the Pine View campus will be a big adjustment for teachers and students alike, but there is a lot to look forward to. In this new environment, many classes will be enabled to grow into an even better version of the current curricula.
A version of this article appears in print on Dec. 17, 2021, News, Page 1, of The Torch with the headline: Building 17: A Whole New World.
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