Moving to new home

Ashley River Creative Arts Elementary students won't walk into their new 47,400-square-foot building later this month.

The arts-infused West Ashley magnet school plans to celebrate the moment by parading into the new site with music and fanfare.

"We've all waited for this space to open," said school Principal Jayne Ellicott. "We're going to make it into a production."

The school community has sacrificed convenience and classrooms for the past two years, but their payoff will be moving into a new building two years ahead of schedule. Construction of the school's new campus is being done in phases, and the first portion ready for students is a two-story building with 28 classrooms, administrative offices and a media center.

The school agreed to the phased approach so that the project would be finished sooner. Construction on the new school wouldn't have started until this summer if the school had waited to relocate to a temporary site. Instead, school leaders chose to stay on the same campus and move more than half of its students to mobile units so construction could begin two years ago.

The entire school will move into the new building, and the former academic wing occupied by students will be demolished and rebuilt as classrooms for pre- kindergarten and kindergarten students. The cafeteria will be renovated, and the adjacent building will be gutted and refurbished to house arts classes such as ballet, drama, violin and art. Students weren't supposed to move into the new building until January, but construction finished ahead of schedule.

While the school waits for the next phase of construction tofinish next summer, it will continue to make concessions, such as operating without a cafeteria and students eating lunch in their rooms. Some of the arts teachers will use workrooms and conference rooms as classrooms this school year; ballet, for example, will be taught in the media specialist's workroom. But teachers unanimously supported moving everyone into the new building at the same time and figuring out how to make it work, Ellicott said.

"It's hard to walk through here and not to want to be here," she said. "It's fresh and beautiful. I didn't think I'd live to see this day."

Ashley River opened 25 years ago in a former middle school building that wasn't designed to house an arts-infused school, so this new building marks the first time the school will have a space designed for its program. Arts classes such as violin always have been housed in mobile classrooms because the former building didn't have space for them, she said.

"We've never been in one space together," Ellicott said.

The new campus will allow the school to make a small dent on its waiting list; enrollment will be increased by about 50 to 600 students. When the entire school is finished, projected to be next summer, it will be 78,000 square feet.

The school's architect, Liollio Architecture, used color throughout the building to ensure it appeared child-friendly and inviting. The new building has a color palate of muted yellows, greys and blues as well as a bold red that adorns tiles and doors. Each classroom has a colored accent wall, molding and tiles. The long hallways are broken up by lights encased in colored beams that drop down from the ceiling, and the hallways include sound-absorption panels that will double as boards to display students' artwork.

Some of the buildings' unique features include an atrium and skylight in its entryway, and every classroom has sinks and countertops because of the number of art projects students work on each week. The new building has adult bathrooms scattered throughout it, compared with the two previously available to staff. It has a bus loop and conference rooms, both firsts for the school.

"It'll be worth the wait once we get in there," Ellicott said.

Reach Diette Courrégé at 937-5546 or dcourrege@postandcourier.com.