Near the end of last school year, it was announced that the Library Science building would close before the start of the 2023-2024 school year due to the deteriorating condition of the facility.
This year, with the Teacher’s Lounge converted into an art classroom and some teachers working from rolling carts, the makeup of the school looks very different.
But what is the long-term plan?
Principal David Sunich offers some insight into the future of PHS without the building.
“The old Library Science building is completely shut down; [we have] no staff or students in there. We still have some materials in there that are waiting on the space they’re going to go to. We can access them, but it’s not a spot we’re supposed to be going into,” Sunich said.
The school is currently going through the process of gaining approval for the building to be torn down.
“We do have plans in place to have six new portables added to our campus that go out behind portables 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, kind of right in that grassy area behind there. And the plan is, if all goes well, we’ll have those ready to go to start next school year. So that should provide us with enough classroom spaces so all teachers will have their own classroom,” Sunich said.
Currently, two teachers teach by moving between classrooms on rolling carts, which was the only option as the school doesn’t have enough classrooms for every teacher to have their own room.
“Arthur Welch is our new social studies teacher, and he teaches most of his classes just on the second-floor hallway now in different people’s classrooms for each of his periods. And then [Melanie] Muller, one of our art teachers, teaches within the other two art teachers’ classrooms and then she has one in another classroom,” Sunich said.
While the building is officially closed and power has been shut off, the building is still used to store materials and textbooks that have no place to go.
“Once we’re able to remove all those books and get them to where they’re going to be housed, once we’re finished preparing the science lab that was created here in the main building, so all those science materials can be taken out of there… then it will be condemned to be permanently locked up so nobody will go in and out and then it will be officially shut,” Sunich said.
Read more about how the closure of the Library-Science Building has affected different parts of life at Puyallup High School:
Staff Remains Positive On Library Despite Setbacks
