It’s moving day for many Lake County students. The new $13 million, state-of-the-art, Eustis Heights Elementary will open Monday.
As it stands, Eustis Heights Elementary is a series of small aging buildings, most built in the 1950s. Inside the F-rated school, the technology in classrooms include 19-inch square TVs and VCRs.
Eustis Heights Elementary assistant principal Chad Frazier showed off the touchscreen technology the school is getting before anyone else in the state.
“These 65-inch flat screen TVs are able for six kids to come and touch them at the same time and still have the same functionality,” he said.
Opening at the end of the school year means 21 classrooms are having to make trip after trip across campus to help teachers move their supplies. The new 93,000-square-foot building, complete with a new main office, media center and cafeteria, was completed by Spring Break. But the administration decided to wait until after testing was done to move in. They also wanted to move in now, so fifth graders who watched construction the past two years wouldn’t miss out.
“It’s pretty awesome,” fifth grader Kyesha Pointer said.
"There's a lot of new stuff and kids are really going to like it," fellow fifth grader Tyler Maple said.
A lot of the training on the new technology will come over the summer, while crews demolish the adjacent buildings administrators feel had been holding students back.
“It builds morale for them," teacher Jennifer Cavallaro said. "They have all of this new stuff that they get to use and they are going to want to use it and they are going to want to learn and they are going to want to show off."
“This has been a lot of long hours we’ve put into building this building and it makes it every bit worth it every time we see the kids come through and see the smiles on their faces,” Frazier said.
The school’s newest buildings, which were built in 2002, will remain and be used for Kindergarten through second grade.