Loud, leaky HVAC systems, basement classrooms beneath the basketball court, overcrowded hallways, inadequate bathrooms and missing ceiling tiles — these are some of the issues students and staff at Vaughn experience every day.
The Vaughn building was completed in 1956 and is the oldest standard middle school in the Washoe County School District; however, last week, the district’s board of trustees voted to fund initial planning and design work for a new building on the same site.
Mandy Lobkowicz is the principal at Vaughn, and she says the whole school community is ready for a new facility and hopes the change will inspire more pride in her students.
“It’s going to be really exciting for our students and families to have a big, new facility and pride in our building so that they can be proud of themselves, proud of the hard work they’re putting into their education,” she shared.
The district currently plans to adapt the process and design of the new O’Brien Middle School that opened at the start of this school year. For that project, the district built the new building on the school’s existing athletic fields so students could still learn in the old building during construction. Once students and staff moved into the new building, the old one was demolished and became the site for new fields.
The O’Brien prototype is a three-story model and the district’s preliminary analysis shows that it would fit on the Vaughn site.
District Chief Operating Officer Adam Searcy hopes the new building doesn’t just improve the learning and teaching environment at Vaughn — he also wants to make sure the building can serve as a hub for the surrounding neighborhood.
“All of our schools are public facilities and really are the heart, in many instances, of the communities that they serve, and so having an opportunity to design a school with that in mind and incorporate intentionally the spaces and the access to the resources that our community needs,” he said.
All Vaughn students are eligible for free or reduced lunch and 73 percent of the student body is Latino. In the new building, Searcy hopes to make social services more accessible to families.
Jose Davila IV is a corps member for Report for America, an initiative of the GroundTruth Project.
