THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, November 9, 1995 TAG: 9511070105
SECTION: NORFOLK COMPASS PAGE: 10 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Cover Story
SOURCE: BY JON GLASS, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 216 lines
NORVIEW MIDDLE SCHOOL science teacher Emily Pugh used to feel like a homeless person when she came to work. Because the school had more teachers than classrooms, she loaded her lab equipment on a cart and ``floated'' from room to room throughout the day.
For 10 years she did that. Students became accustomed to seeing her pushing her cart down crowded hallways.
``They used to call me the `Bag Lady,' '' Pugh said. ``I did that until I just couldn't stand it any longer.''
Nobody's calling her Bag Lady this year: Pugh finally has a room to call her own.
With September's opening of the spacious new Norview Middle, Pugh, an eighth-grade teacher, set up house in a well-equipped classroom ``where students can feel like they're in a real science laboratory.''
She couldn't resist adding a few homey touches to the third-floor space, filling a window sill with plants and purchasing fabric to design her own bulletin boards.
``For me, this is a dream come true,'' said Pugh, who taught 24 years at the old Norview. ``I tell people I'm in the penthouse. I love this spot, I really do. They're going to have to drag me out of here.''
In every corner of this modern $11.5 million, 153,500-square-foot school, the response is the same, from administrators, teachers, students and parents: They LOVE this place.
After years of coping with an aging 1920s-era building that leaked when it rained, housed rats and roaches, lacked air conditioning and often heat, and was literally falling down around them, they wonder whether they've died and gone to heaven. The old school has been razed to make room for an athletic field in front of the new Norview.
``Everyone is on cloud nine,'' Principal Frank L. Steadman said.
Mike Ortiz, father of a seventh-grader and a fifth-grader who will be at Norview Middle next year, said:
``I'm really glad the city spent the money to make that school. It's kind of tough when you see other neighborhoods with nice schools and then you'd go to ours and it looked like something the Addams family lived in.''
Joy Wotherspoon, a health and physical education teacher who started at Norview in 1966, said: ``It's like your first year of teaching. Everything is exciting and fresh, and you enjoy getting up in the morning and going to work. I haven't said that in years.''
Seventh-grader Christopher Cooper, 13, in the media center searching a computer network to gather information for a science project on plants, said: ``I think it's perfect. . . . It's got air-conditioning, more space and higher technology.''
City school board members are crowing, too. Joseph Waldo, of the board's capital improvements committee, said the board rejected the low bid because it was several hundred thousand dollars over budget.
Instead of negotiating with the low bidder, as is typical, Waldo said the board made cost-cutting changes in the building specifications and rebid the project.
The result: savings of about $500,000, he said. Some of the alterations were simple: $7,000 in landscaping costs, for instance, was cut by planting trees two inches in diameter instead of four inches; another $100,000 was trimmed by using metal instead of stone to cap the building's brick facade.
``The goal was that it could not affect the educational process or the usability of the building, and we didn't want to affect it aesthetically,'' Waldo said.
Norview Middle is the first new school to come off the drawing board since the 1993 opening of Ruffner Middle, the city's most high-tech school.
As expected with a new building, Steadman said, there have been glitches to contend with: electrical outlets that didn't work, for instance, and equipment that was out of order or that hadn't been installed. Steadman said he's still waiting on a request he made in July for double entrance doors to the media center.
In some cases, teachers still are learning to use new technology. The school, with about 1,100 students, has more than 200 computers.
Regardless, Steadman said, ``Teachers were teaching, with or without their equipment, from Day 1 - that was what was impressive.''
Just to have a new building lifts the spirits of teachers and students. But the real payoff, educators say, is having a facility that enables them to better equip children with skills needed to compete in today's fast-paced world.
``We're actually keeping up with the 20th century; we're in the '90s, finally,'' said Jan Klingberg, who teaches an exploratory computer class to seventh- and eighth-graders.
In Klingberg's class, archaic 1980s-vintage IBM computers have been replaced by super-fast Power Macs. Students have access to a host of sophisticated software and videolike CD-ROMs. Advanced students, for instance, can prepare for the SAT, the college-entrance exam given in high school, by using a personal SAT trainer program.
Eventually, students should be able to tap into the Internet and the World Wide Web, she said.
A few examples of how students and teachers are benefiting from the new school:
In the foreign language lab, a headphone system allows teachers to monitor individual students as they use VCRs or CDs to practice speaking Spanish, French or Russian, the three languages offered at the school. The headphones are stored on three separate booms that are concealed inside ceiling panels until the teacher activates them from an instrument panel.
``I can hear each child's pronunciation, and what they are mispronouncing,'' Spanish teacher Beverly Thorpe said. ``I think they feel more confident, to be able to use professional equipment; it's real to them.''
Thorpe said 25 more students signed up for Spanish 1 classes this year. Last year, Thorpe taught in a mobile trailer. On rainy days, kids came in wet and tracked mud.
``We were just sort of disconnected from the main school,'' Thorpe said.
Teachers can communicate instantly with one another, the main office and the media center with wall telephones mounted in every room. Teachers feel safer with the phones, which Steadman said have drawn more positive comment than any other amenity.
Every classroom also is equipped with a television set that is connected to the media center, the brain of the school. By placing a call to the media specialist, teachers can order up classroom showings of VHS tapes or laser discs. Teachers control the screening with remote controls.
``It allows them to really integrate media into their instruction quite well,'' Esther Gorham, library media specialist, said.
Added Steadman: ``We've come a long way from the teacher going to the library to get a film projector and having to splice film together.''
In the media center, computers are networked, allowing users to pull up information sources from any computer in the center. Eventually, students will broadcast morning news announcements over the school's television system from a production studio in the center.
Technology teachers estimate that $500,000 was invested to outfit their classes with computers and equipment to expose students to possible careers, such as rocketry and space, robotics, computer graphics, electronics and engineering.
``In middle school we're not trying to make an engineer; we're just trying to spark a cinder,'' said Technology Lab 2000 instructor Robert Shelton, Norview's teacher of the year last year.
Shelton is proud of an authentic miniature wind tunnel for testing the aerodynamics of cartridge gas-powered cars his students will design and build, just like Ford or Chrysler. His old tunnel consisted of a makeshift cardboard frame and a fan turned backwards.
Shelton also brags about his first drafting plotter, which students can use to make computer drawings to scale and get printouts of the design specs. He has the technology for them to make a drawing and add sound and animation - ``something we've never been able to do before.''
He's excited about one goody he hasn't sprung yet - a joystick-like yolk handle that can be fitted on a computer in tandem with software endorsed by the Federal Aviation Administration. It'll provide hands-on flight training for pilot wannabes who learn to maneuver computer jets and other aircraft on the screen.
For all the advancements, Shelton said he's having to burn the midnight oil to bring himself up to speed.
``I stay here late at night to figure out how to do it just to stay a step ahead of the kids,'' Shelton said. ``If we teachers can keep up, it's an exciting time to be a teacher - it's fun.''
Planners made sure the arts didn't get short shrift. There are three music rooms - one each for orchestra, band and chorus - equipped with a sound system. Kids can access software programs to compose their own songs for sheet music.
Art teacher Debbie Watts raves about her new digs: a clay room, a darkroom, ample sinks, hot water, air conditioning and heat.
``It wasn't unusual to be wearing earmuffs and gloves (in the winter),'' Watts said. ``It's hard for children to concentrate in an atmosphere that's not conducive to learning.''
While students may not be any more eager to go to school, they're pretty impressed with the new building.
``I think it's beautiful,'' said eighth-grader Sabrina Sherwood. She likes the glassed-in atrium, which rises three stories and forms a central courtyard. ``I like the way it goes straight up, and you can see the sky. It's really pretty. At old Norview, I never wanted to go; it was so dark and depressing.''
Seventh-grader Mark Overton said, ``The carpet is nice and clean, and they have ice cold water in the water fountains - last year it was warm.''
Seventh-grader Stephen Beale likes the way everything is contained in one building. In the old school, the lunchroom and gym were in separate buildings.
``If it was raining, you got wet,'' he said.
Each grade is on a separate floor. And students within each grade are ``clustered'' with the same group of teachers in the four core academic subjects: math, science, English and social studies.
Teachers said the layout encouraged a sense of community within the building. Each teacher cluster has office space for planning, a luxury that also has improved coordination of lesson plans for teaching across subjects, teachers said.
``Aside from morale, and aside from having more working space and better working facilities, I think children work best in conditions they feel comfortable in,'' said Pugh, the science teacher.
Parent Denise Yuhas said her daughter enjoys school more now and is doing better. Yuhas said she hopes the children will continue to respect the school after the newness wears off.
``This one here is 100 percent better in every way,'' Yuhas said. ``Hopefully, the kids'll enjoy it and won't destroy it.'' ILLUSTRATION: [Cover]
THE NEW NORVIEW MIDDLE SCHOOL
[Color Photo]
ON THE COVER
The cover photo, taken by staff photographer Richard L. Dunston,
shows the new Norview Middle School's atrium.
Staff photos by RICHARD L. DUNSTON
Emily Pugh, standing, now teaches science in a well-equipped
classroom. At the old school, she pushed her lab equipment around on
a cart.
T-shaped hallways in the school allow one teacher to monitor an
entire wing of the building.
Ronnie Barnes and Christina Turner work in the computer lab. The new
Norview Middle School has more than 200 computers.
The principal at Norview Middle is Frank L. Steadman, who says,
``Everyone is on cloud nine.''
This is the view that students have of their new school as they
arrive by bus each day.
Crystal Busby, left, and Jada Grover share a dictionary in the
library.
by CNB