Paso Robles schools get ready to change classrooms 

Roll-off bins at three Paso Robles schools wait to be filled as teachers and staff begin packing up their classrooms in anticipation of summer moves.

"Start packing and purging as soon as possible," Facilities and Planning Assistant Project Coordinator Britiany Baker told the Paso Robles Joint Unified School District board on April 16. "We're going to learn from our past moves to have everything packed and ready to go for when the movers come."

Teachers at Georgia Brown Elementary School, Lewis Middle School, and Flamson Middle School have 15 pages of packing instructions to guide them—a roadmap to help their classrooms get from point A to point B during the nine-week summer ahead as the district reconfigures itself, Baker said.

The roll-off bins are for the purge. For everything else, packing boxes, bubble wrap, tape, and other materials were being delivered to classrooms, Assistant Superintendent Brad Pawlowski told board members. Those boxes, desks, chairs, and more will be whisked away by Meathead Movers starting on June 10, Baker said.

At the April 16 meeting, the board unanimously approved a contract with Meathead for the moves, which should wrap up just before the first day of school on Aug. 15.

In February, the Paso school board approved Lewis Middle School's campus as the new site of the district's dual immersion program—currently a kindergarten through fifth-grade program housed at Georgia Brown Elementary School, a campus that's closing due to a geologic anomaly that was discovered beneath the site last May. Students, teachers, and the program are moving to the Lewis school site, and the program will eventually expand to include sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-grade classrooms.

During the April 16 board meeting, the district's board also approved buying three additional mobile modular buildings as part of a larger purchase. Pawlowski said the district would need three temporary classrooms for the dual immersion program's expansion, which would be cheaper to buy this year alongside the other temporary buildings the district needs.

He added that the district would "stockpile" the three temporary buildings at Lewis but wouldn't connect them until next year.

"We're going to place them in the permanent location. They would be set on the blacktop," Pawlowski said. "They would be secured together; they just wouldn't have electrical to them yet."

As part of that February approval, the board also agreed to make Flamson Middle School the district's only junior high school for seventh and eighth grade and to add sixth grade to all of the district's elementary schools.

"We have to first move the classrooms from Lewis that are needing work done on them. But, in order to do that, we have to make sure there's room at Flamson," Baker told the board on April 16. "So there's a lot of planning that has gone into this, and I really have it planned out day by day with the movers."

Some of the teachers at Lewis will be moving to elementary school campuses, and some Flamson teachers will be moving to elementary schools or the high school. At Flamson, Baker said, there will be on-campus moves as well.

Amid all the moving, the district is also refurbishing rooms to accommodate for elementary school students, doing demolition and construction at both Lewis and Flamson, and deep cleaning.

Board member Sondra Williams asked Baker what she was most nervous about.

"Not having everything packed and having to spend time packing when we could be using that time moving and working on projects," Baker said.

Luckily, Pawlowski added, the current principal at Lewis was at Glen Speck Elementary School during its moves—the school moved to a temporary campus while its campus was renovated and then back after construction was completed. Δ