With the school year coming to a close, teachers must prepare for migration into a new building, and therefore into new classrooms. To ease the process, many teachers are trying to take as little as they can to the new school; many old items are being thrown or given away. Teachers will begin moving this summer.
“There is a moving company that is…starting the major moves in late July,” said LM principal Sean Hughes.
One group of teachers that is having a particularly difficult time in the moving process is the chemistry teachers, who must worry about the transfer of expensive, and sometimes dangerous, chemical equipment. However, many of the chemistry teachers will be throwing away old or useless lab materials, which will make this task easier.
“Besides any personal items such as notebooks, unit lesson plans and demonstration materials, we have to move all the glassware, chemicals and lab equipment,” said chemistry teacher Patrick Cronin. “Examples of things that will be discarded include: old and broken equipment, and old chemicals that are spoiled or have clumped together. The chemicals will be removed and discarded properly by an approved hazardous waste company.”
However, disposal of lab equipment will only occur for a small portion of the materials, and most of them will be transferred over to the new school.
Many other teachers also must worry about the transfer of materials and often useless or obsolete objects are thrown away. The LM music department must deal with the transfer of musical instruments, as well as other departmental items such as sheet music, trophies from music festivals, and music stands.
“We’re actually keeping a large chunk of the stuff we use day-to-day; we’re transporting the entire sheet music library…[and] all of the school-owned instruments,” said music teacher Aaron Datsko. “We’ll be disposing of a lot of items that are no longer useful, outdated, or just plain broken. With the building being close to 50 years old, there’s a lot of junk that accumulates in a room the size of the band room.”
The new building will offer many other benefits for teachers. The staff looks forward to new classrooms for reasons spanning from brand new, state-of-the art teaching materials to simply a more comfortable teaching environment. Science teachers will acquire fully functional lab equipment, alongside large classrooms to accommodate more expansive lab tables.
Though many teachers will lose both materials and a familiar environment by leaving the current LM building, the new school will be filled with the latest teaching materials and will feel like home in no time.
By Ian Cohn
Class of 2012
