Don’t blink now because city officials have pulled out all of the stops to get a new Pickering Middle School designed and built.
The process is a couple of years away from completion, but the local urgency is well-founded because the stakes could not be higher for the Lynn public schools and local students and their parents when it comes to getting a new middle school built.
A visit to the existing Pickering, outside Wyoma Square, triggers competing emotions of pride and shame. The sense of pride is rooted in seeing students, teachers and other school employees shoulder the task of education in a building constructed before World War I ended. The feeling of shame comes from seeing the same people learning and teaching in water-stained classrooms and hallways long past showing their age.
Like a big rock tossed into a calm pond, a new Pickering’s construction will send ripples across the Lynn public schools. With an enrollment pegged at 1,660 students by state school building officials, a new Pickering will be substantially bigger than the almost-completed Marshall Middle School.
Like Marshall, a brand-new Pickering is an opportunity to consign aging albatrosses to the history books and shove middle school education in Lynn firmly into the 21st century. Both schools will have state-of-the-art technology. They will be organized around teaching students using the latest education methods.
Middle school is an unprecedented time of growth in a student’s life from a social standpoint and physical and intellectual development perspective. Middle school students say goodbye to the safe harbor of elementary school and grasp the tools and opportunities that give them a chance to define, for the first time in their young lives, their futures.
Rundown schools — even ones with great teachers — cloud that view beyond the horizon of adolescence. School Superintendent Catherine Latham has eloquently and clearly stated that it is important for local middle schools to give Lynn students reasons to come to school. Those reasons start in the classroom but they extend into elective and extracurricular activities.
Brand-new schools are the best places to influence and inspire young minds. With that thought firmly grasped, let’s hope the momentum behind building a new Pickering does not slacken.