Dear Editor,
As we look forward to the opening of the new Owego Elementary School in early January, we want to address some questions that members of the community have posed about the new building. One concern is the size of the new school.
It’s true that the new school is larger than the old OES, by square footage. But in fact, the number of regular education classrooms and the size of those spaces in the new elementary school are roughly the same as those in the old OES. However, there are several areas that add to the overall size of the new school.
One obvious area is the auditorium in the new school; there was none in the old building. We added three large-group instructional spaces; the old building had only one, but it was very heavily used. The new building will also have a classroom for instruction in health and physical education.
There are several additional classrooms, offices and spaces for special education that are now mandated by federal and state disability law. None of those spaces were required when the old OES was built in the mid-1960s. So, for example, offices and teaching spaces were added to the new building for a psychologist, a social worker, occupational therapists, physical therapists, speech and hearing therapists, and reading and math specialists.
Those spaces did not exist in the old OES and, in fact, those professionals operated for many years out of closets (literally), and in other makeshift, partitioned spaces. In many instances, therapists have needed to work with children in hallways because that’s the only available space they had.
Every inch of the new school was reviewed and approved by our funding agencies, including FEMA, the NYS Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Services, and the New York State Education Department. Our mandate was to design a building to replace the old, flood-damaged building, and to make sure that the design was up to current building codes and educational standards. And finally, we wanted to design a building that would meet the needs of our community for decades to come.
I hope this helps in understanding the reasons why the new school is bigger than the old OES.
Sincerely,
Stephen Jensen
Public Information Coordinator, Owego Apalachin Schools
