CHAMPAIGN – The Champaign school board Monday night approved the design for a new Washington Elementary School and heard more about plans for an expansion of Garden Hills Elementary School.

The district plans to tear down the existing Washington school and build a new school on the same site. It will expand Garden Hills and both schools will become magnet schools, with Garden Hills focusing on international education, including foreign language, with a secondary emphasis on the arts. Washington school will have a STEM theme, or Science, Technology, Engineering and Math.

Architects for the projects talked about not only the buildings, but also the traffic flow at the schools.

The Washington school plans call for bus traffic to use Wright Street to get to the parking lot northeast of the school, where children will get on and off the buses.

Car traffic will use Grove Street, and that street will be one-way between Wright and Sixth streets during dropoff and pickup times, said Stu Brodsky of OWP/P of Chicago.

Brodsky said there will be a traffic impact analysis done for the traffic flow for the school. School board President Dave Tomlinson said any decisions on traffic flow will be made later, in conjunction with city officials.

Sam Johnson of BLDD Architects of Champaign talked about traffic flow at Garden Hills. The plan calls for bus traffic to use Sandra Street to Cynthia Drive, and parents driving their kids to school to use Garden Hills Drive to Honeysuckle.

The plan aims to separate bus and car traffic from the areas children use when walking to school, so they don't have to cross vehicular traffic, Johnson said.

School board member Kristine Chalifoux questioned whether parents would actually follow the plan.

"I just don't see it working over the long term," Chalifoux said. "I don't see this as being the dropoff people are going to use."

The architects made changes to the plans for Washington in response to concerns of some school board members when they saw the initial design at a board meeting two weeks ago.

Double doors were added that can close off the commons and gym areas, both to reduce noise in the rest of the building and to secure the rest of the building if it is open at night for an event in the gym, Brodsky said.

Some board members said they were still concerned about public access to the second floor of the school.

The board's approval of the design means they've approved the basic footprint or layout of the building. But details of the building can still change if necessary.

The Washington school design included "piazzas," or areas outside each grade level of classrooms. The areas were to help create more of a team approach to teaching each grade level, by having an area where, say, all three first-grade classrooms could meet as a group, where they could work on special projects, or where large or small groups of students could work together, Brodsky said.

Some school board members were concerned the piazzas were too long and narrow to serve that purpose well, so the architects modified the plan to make the piazzas closer to rectangle shapes, Brodsky said.

They've added glass in the art room at the school's request, so it is no longer open to the first floor below, and they've closed off one side of the stage that is between the commons and the gym, to reduce noise and eliminate the possibility of balls or other objects coming from the gym into the cafeteria during lunch.

The new, two-story Washington school will have space for three classrooms at each grade level. It will include a central "STEM studio" to provide space for science experiments.

Plans for Garden Hills call for performance spaces, both large and small, throughout the school. The gym and cafeteria will combine to make the largest performance space, able to accommodate the entire school.

The school will also have collaboration areas for each grade level, for use by teachers and students.

Board member Greg Novak questioned whether there was enough room in the school for four classrooms at each grade level and self-contained gifted classrooms. Tomlinson asked administrators to look into the issue and report back to the board.

The board is expected to review and approve the design for Garden Hills at its Nov. 30 meeting.

In other business, the board approved a high school redistricting plan
that rezones the area northeast of Interstate 74 to Central High School
and the area south of Windsor Road and west of Interstate 57 to Centennial
High School.

The plan would also move two areas between Russell Street and Mattis
Avenue -- one south of Kirby Avenue and one between Springfield and
Bradley avenues -- from Centennial’s district to Central’s. Centennial
would gain students from the northwest part of the city.

The new plan will go into effect for the 2010-11 school year. No current
high school students will have to change schools, and the plan includes a
policy so younger siblings can attend the same high school as their older
brothers and sisters, depending on the grade level of the siblings and the
current high school students.