Inspectional Services Department Director Michael Donovan said city officials will review bids from companies interested in providing the modular unit for Tracy Elementary School this month and select school yard space to locate it.
BY THOR JOURGENSEN
LYNN — A modular building with two classrooms will be built next to Tracy Elementary School to help ease overcrowding in the 440-student school.
School Department enrollment data posted this week named Tracy as one of two schools with classes containing 30 or more students. Lynn Woods has 30 youngsters in first grade and Tracy’s two fifth grades each have 32.
The $500,000 modular, pre-constructed building is expected to be completed by the start of school in September.
Michael Donovan, Inspectional Services Department director, said city officials will review bids from companies interested in providing the modular unit this month and select school yard space to locate it.
Tracy already uses a modular building. The Edward A. Sisson, Hood and Ingalls elementary schools also have modular classrooms.
Tracy’s deteriorating brick exterior and other building problems prompted the city council this month to seek state approval to replace the school. Built in 1898 on Walnut Street, Tracy had a 366-student enrollment 20 years ago.
School officials are taking steps to fit a growing student population. Five years ago, 14,000 students attended Lynn’s schools. That number reached 15,800 earlier this month.
Fewer than 7,000 elementary school students were enrolled in 2011 compared to 7,850 listed in current enrollment figures.
The School Department marked a historic moment in local history when the last students filed out of Marshall Middle School on Porter Street. When they return from school vacation on April 25, they will walk into a new Marshall on Brookline Street.
The new school, with its brick, masonry and glass foyer, will be designed around a “cluster” education concept.
Sixth- through eighth-graders will be grouped in three clusters per grade with academic classes — science, mathematics, English and social studies — grouped in each cluster of 120 students.
Centered around the foyer will be two wings rising four stories high on one side of the school and two stories on the other side with the shorter wing devoted to the gymnasium and cafeteria.
Superintendent Catherine Latham previously said the school will offer “specialty” programs essential to helping keep students in school at a time in their academic lives when the pressures of learning combined with “social and emotional baggage” can drive them to drop out.
“It will have a beautiful woodworking shop,” said Donovan.
The new Marshall’s completion sets the stage for design and planning to build a new Pickering Middle School and to find ways to ease elementary school overcrowding.
Donovan said plans to date call for demolishing the old Marshall. Built in 1917 and six years older than Marshall, Pickering is in better structural condition and could serve, Donovan said, as potential space for elementary school classrooms after another middle school — or schools — are built.
“Pickering is in relatively good shape. Marshall is in poor condition with bricks falling out of it. It’s a school that is showing its age,” Donovan said.
Thor Jourgensen can be reached at [email protected].