State Rep. Barbara McLachlan visited Bayfield schools Tuesday, starting at the primary school on South Street.
McLachlan taught for 22 years at Durango High School and was elected to the State Legislature in 2016. She has been touring schools in the nine school districts in the six counties that she represents.
She brought a storybook with her titled "If I Were President," about kids imagining themselves as President of the United States. She read it to first graders from Elizabeth Bauer's and Madeline Shea's classes.
At the end she asked how many of the kids would like to be president. Most raised their hands. Then she asked what they would like to do if they were president. One little girl suggested a law for people to get together and learn about different cultures. Another would make us have less wars. Another wanted to build houses for homeless people. Another wanted to help people who are poor. One wanted to be president forever, not just eight years.
After visiting with the first graders, McLachlan toured the primary school with Principal Diane Sallinger, Assistant Principal Bill Hesford, and the district's new Human Resources Director, Dot Clemens. Clemens was one of McLachlan's students at DHS and graduated in 2000.
They showed McLachlan an intervention classroom for several special needs kids, then the regular kindergarten and first grade classrooms. Those include the old white school built in the mid 1920s as well as the newer part of the school.
Hesford said that one year they had seven sections of kindergarten and built a classroom in what was once the gym in the old school. More classrooms are in use upstairs above the gym. There are four classrooms in two modular buildings as well.
Sallinger said all grades in K-5 all have five or six sections, including more than 130 fifth graders.
The district stopped using the South Street buildings in the late 1990s, considering them no longer suitable for kids, but had to move students back in, starting with kindergarten and then first grade, in the early to mid 2000s because of lack of space in the elementary school. The modulars were added in 2005.
Sallinger said "specials" classes such as art and music are in the west building, the former middle school.
Sallinger, Hesford, and Clemens then accompanied McLachlan to the elementary school, where classes are being juggled with major construction work to convert it to serve grades K-2, and then to the new school for grades 3-5 being built across the street from the mid school.
District owner's representative Marty Zwisler said the plan is to have both the elementary and new intermediate school ready to open for fall 2018.
In 2016 the district applied for and received a $8.56 million BEST grant from the state to cover about 25 percent of the construction projects, contingent on voters approving a $28.7 million bond issue to cover the rest. That was approved in November 2016 by less than 200 votes. BEST grants focus on health, safety, and security issues. The district priority is to get kids out of the old buildings on South Street.
