The $15 million, hoped-for expansion to Lakewood Elementary
Exterior of portable
A group of Lakewood parents recently decided they don’t have the time to wait on Dallas ISD bond money for much-needed updates to Lakewood Elementary. Instead, they’re taking matters into their own hands.
While volunteering in her daughter’s first-grade class at Lakewood Elementary, Dorcy Clark thought the room felt awfully stuffy and dark. She asked the teacher if they could open a window, but found there are no windows in the portable classrooms at Lakewood Elementary.
Something had to be done to change that, Clark decided; the school is too academically advanced for the buildings to be so outdated.
Lakewood Elementary opened in 1951, and the portables were put in years later as a temporary solution to accommodate overflow, but a temporary solution stretched into a permanent fixture. Now more than half the students at Lakewood Elementary are in portables, explains LEEF spokesperson Amy Fennegan, and the last bond funding was little more than a Band-Aid for the facility.
Yet despite that, Lakewood Elementary has still managed to climb to academic excellence.
Its students perform well above the state average on the TAKS test, according to the Texas Tribune. It has managed to bring in great teachers whose longevity at the school speaks for itself, and parent involvement is a reality rather than a nice idea.
So imagine what the school could do if it had a facility that actually fostered learning, Clark thought. They needed a home makeover, big time.
Clark began researching and soon took the matter to the district to inquire about the possibility of being on the next bond package, but the news she received there was disappointing. “They have a lot of facilities and a lot of needs. We just can’t count on it,” she says.
So, she devised another plan, which she took before the Lakewood Elementary PTA and School-Based Decision Making (SBDM) boards: Instead of waiting on the city to dole out funds, why don’t they just raise their own? That’s when LEEF — the Lakewood Elementary Expansion Foundation — was born. “This struck a chord with some of the parents,” Fennegan says. “So we embarked on this journey together.”
A stuffy portable classroom.
LEEF is a non-profit organization created to raise and manage enough money for two permanent buildings to replace the portables at Lakewood Elementary.
They hope to raise enough for a 45,000-square-foot addition, which would include 37 to 42 new classrooms, new cafeteria, a new library/media room and much more, as well as a renovation of the existing 45,000-square-foot building.
Based on similar projects in the area, they figure they’ll need about $15 million, Fennegan says, although they can easily build in phases, if needed.
And in order for the parents involved in the project to reap the benefits of their efforts, they need it fast, before their kids move onward and upward. They hope to raise the funds by the end of 2014, Fennegan says.
That, of course, raises a pressing question: Is that possible?
“We’re all thinking that,” Fennegan says, “and we all feel confident that it is possible, that there’s enough people who want to support public education and help support the success.”
They mostly plan to pull from local companies, foundations, organizations and private donors, she says. “The parents aren’t going to be the sole or even the majority donors for this project. We really have to cast a broader net than that. The community will be behind this.”
And if they pull it off, it’s not a bad deal for DISD, either, Fennegan says.
“If we can raise the standard of the facility, we can have a world-class learning facility in our community that is public,” she explained.
“For me personally, I love that idea, because then it’s available to families who can’t afford private education. There are plenty of families at Lakewood who could afford to go to private school, but many of us choose not to do that because we believe in public education.”
To see more 3-D renderings of the proposed expansion, watch the video from LEEF:
http://youtu.be/0UjGxF8vu7I
