As the father of two Pierce School graduates, I’m both nostalgic about the 1970s building now being demolished and excited about the building that will replace it. (The two emotions are not mutually exclusive.)
Years ago, the school held a program about the building’s history. The architect who designed it spoke, along with a panel including a teacher and a librarian who worked at Pierce when it opened and another teacher who was a student at Pierce at the time (and still teaches there.)
The open classrooms in the central core of the building fostered collaboration and awareness of others among both teachers and students, they said. The design also included one closed classroom per grade, knowing that not all students could prosper in the open environment.
As the school population grew, those closed classrooms were repurposed for learning centers and other uses, with classrooms shoehorned into other spaces. In addition, not all parts of the building were handicapped-accessible, and the concrete structure made retrofitting it impossible.
I’ll be forever grateful for the education my daughters received at the old Pierce and am confident that the “Pierce Pride” the school has long boasted of will continue in the new building.
Read the original article, What to know about the Pierce School demolition and construction