Goodyear Students, Families, Tour Their New School

They “oohed” and “ahhed” over the classrooms, the art room, media center and the lockers for fourth and fifth graders. The gym and cafeteria, too.

They commented on the "new" smell of the place.

At least 200 people visited the new Tuesday evening during an hour-long before-school-starts open house for Goodyear students and their families.

They left the gym in groups of about 25, which grew larger as the hour waned. School staff led the tours.

As a group entered one of the kindergarten classrooms, a group of boys older than kindergarten age “wow’d” over the cubbies for students inside the classroom.

The art room “smells like crayons already,” one of the boys said.

Climbing the stairs to the second floor, one mom commented on the “new” smell of the building.

“You lucky ducks, you,” a woman told a Goodyear student.

Tour guide and music teacher Bethany Newman pointed out various school features, including the white boards in every classroom.

Incoming fourth grader Meredith McFadden was infatuated with the lockers for the fourth and fifth graders.  She was excited, she said, about going to a new school with “lots of cool and neat things"—like the lockers.

Jill Crawford, who described herself as an original Clapp School parent, said she would miss the Clapp School, which closed at the end of the last school year, in anticipation of the new Goodyear opening. The new Goodyear is “fabulous,” she opined.  While she was a “walker” to and from school, her son, Nathan, a Goodyear fourth grader, will be a “busser,” she noted.

“Cool,” is how Nathan Crawford described his new school. He said he worked on a part of one of the mosaics on the wall near the school office, the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

Waiting in the gym around 5:30 p.m. for the tours to start, Chris MacHarrie said he had come to the school—outside—last week to see the class list posted on the glass. His daughter, Taylor, is going into fourth grade at the Goodyear. The school looked “impressive from the outside,” he said.

Inside, Taylor’s mother, Brenda, pointed to the separate cafeteria and gym and auditorium space at the Goodyear. At the Clapp School, which housed students who would have gone to the Goodyear while the new Goodyear was built, along with Clapp School students, Brenda said one room served all those purposes.

Taylor is “excited” to attend the Goodyear “because it’s a new school.”

Most of her friends are going to the Goodyear, her parents said.

At the end of each tour, popsicles were served in the new cafeteria. Goodyear School Principal Christopher Heath, who moved from the Clapp School, said servers gave out 200 popsicles. He stood near the popsicle table, answering questions from parents and talking to students.

By just after 6:30 p.m., the school was close to empty, ready to open Thursday morning for its first-ever day of classes.