Space Constrictions Prove Challenging For City School Additions

Space Constrictions Prove Challenging
For City School Additions

The Lafayette Avenue School classroom
addition is a multimedia center.

As Atlantic City gets casinos, nearby Ventnor gets children.

Elementary school age population has increased more than 25 % in the '90s.

In some cases, they're from families displaced by land acquisitions for huge hotel complexes. Like many others, they fled Atlantic City for neighboring communities along the Atlantic Ocean in New Jersey. In many cases, the children are foreign-born, from families attracted to job opportunities in the casinos.

Good news for real estate sales people and property owners, it challenged school officials in the Ventnor School District. Providing language services was especially challenging.

Ventnor is a barrier island, a two-square mile strip of city on a sand dune -- 1.7 miles long between two other towns and five blocks wide between the Atlantic surf and the waters of the intercoastal waterway in the Beach Thoroughfare. Unlike other government entities, shore towns can't push out their boundary lines. The town's future size is defined by its watery perimeter.

So while other school districts can build new educational complexes to handle population increases, Ventnor has no such luxury.

Ventnor City's Lafayette Avenue School had to grow with the population. Originally constructed in 1970, it was expanded in 1974 and 1983. After designing the successful expansion in '83, BASCO Associates made a repeat performance, designing another two-phase enlargement completed in 1997.

The expansion on a limited parcel of land was made even more difficult by the fact that the school sits on piles over sand, only eight inches above the flood plain.

The latest $2.5 million project renovated some existing space into classrooms, provided new classrooms, small group instruction rooms, an expanded multimedia center, new computer systems and special facilities to support growing computer-based instructional programs.

All of it had to be completed within a compressed seven-month construction window -- a task that might have been impossible elsewhere.

"They're very good, very cooperative people, in fact, the whole town is like that," said BASCO's Project Architect, "They all seem to know how to accomplish exactly what they want and how to get it in a nice way."

"It was clear from the first planning meeting that this school was going to happen on time and within budget. Their well-coordinated effort at that first meeting set the tone for an unusually successful project."

Ventnor's Superintendent, Dr. John A. Buyarski, says it was an ambitious timetable, "We're proud it came in on schedule, although many people doubted we could do it."

Called "The Ventnor Educational Community Complex," the enlarged school is adjacent to the bay, and like every other structure in the city, it's only blocks from the ocean.

Renovations to an occupied school building require an extra effort from teachers and administrators. In Ventnor's case, the construction was right next to the eighth grade. Dr. Buyarski says it was accomplished through good communication and attention to details and schedules.

The work also required temporary fire exits. "We had to adopt some temporary exits and exit lights," Buyarski said, "and we conducted extra fire drills to make sure all the students and teachers were up to speed on our plans."

"We're really proud of how all it went together. When you walk in there you'd never know an addition was part of the project."

This new school is Ventnor's pride and joy, providing educational opportunity for students in grades PK through 8. Ventnor has no high school.

After completing the eighth grades, students in Ventnor City are then bussed to the new Atlantic City High School to continue their education through a special inter-school district sending-receiving relationship that's existed since the 1920s. Atlantic City High is subsidized by casinos and hotel taxes.