Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, August 30, 1994                   TAG: 9408300073
SECTION: CURRENT                    PAGE: CURRENT   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: By MELISSA DeVAUGHN STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG                                  LENGTH: Medium

`EVERYBODY HERE IS NEW'

Kipps Elementary - opened Monday.

Amid the excitement and confusion of the first day of classes at Kipps Elementary School, a little boy walked up to speech pathologist Barbara Piersol in tears. The only person he knew at the new school was a boy in his class who just "hated" him, he cried.

"I told him, 'It's OK, everybody here is new, even the teachers,'" Piersol said. "We're all a little scared."

A minute later, Piersol said, the little boy was walking around his new classroom, all smiles. The anxiety dissolved as the little boy's curiosity took over.

Although the outside of the newly constructed Kipps Elementary School still looks like a construction site, with a backhoe operator at work on the playground and areas of the school campus covered in dirt, the inside of the school was working like a well-oiled machine Monday morning.

Teachers in navy "Kipps Elementary School" T-shirts patrolled the halls, greeted children and directed them to their appropriate spots. In the cafeteria, a whistle-toting teacher assembled the third- and fourth-graders into single-file lines, while other teachers in the gym kept the wide-eyed kindergartners and first-graders in line. The secretaries in the main office answered phone calls from parents and registered new students, while volunteers helped lost children find their way to their classrooms.

Outside, safety patrols monitored children on bicycles, while Principal Ray VanDyke personally greeted every child who got off a bus.

"We've got six buses and one that makes two trips," VanDyke said. Two hundred students live in Hethwood, and many of them choose to ride their bicycles along a path connecting their neighborhood to the school.

Although a few of the school's 475 pupils looked scared, some in tears and some clinging to their parent's legs, most of the children, dressed in their first-day-of-school-best, seemed ready for the year in their brand-new school.

"It's nice here and the soccer field is big and green," said 8-year-old Timmy Long. "It's sort of weird being at a new school, but I have friends here."

Nine-year-old twins Katie and Kallie Wicks agreed the classrooms were the best part of the new school because they "have cubbies for our stuff" and "they're big and wide open."

Ashley Brown, who just moved to Blacksburg from Christiansburg, had never been in the new Kipps Elementary School. She liked the columns, painted to look like giant pencils, that adorn the entranceway.

"The classes have TVs," Luanda Oliveira, 9, raved, while 5-year-old Deanna Rose was more concerned about "eating Gummi-worms for lunch," and "going to recess."

"I was losing sleep because in my mind I kept thinking of all the things that could go wrong," VanDyke said later Monday, when he'd had a chance to sit down for a breather. "It's just the opposite - it's all gone great."