Following the fire

Teachers, students adjust to crowded quarters

Thursday, March 23, 2006

Click here to enlarge this photo Bill Ryan⁄the Gazette Linganore High School teacher Darren Hornbeck stands near the 21 portable classrooms stationed outside the school on Wednesday morning as a gym class passes by. Hornbeck’s portable classroom caught fire earlier this month.

Clustered in the main entrance, many of the school’s 1,594 students go to their lockers and meet in the lobby before classes begin.

Once the bell sounds, students quickly move through the hallways like water in river rapids. When a teenage couple stops to kiss each other goodbye outside a doorway, the flow backs up as other students step aside and keep pressing on to their class.

‘‘They just keep moving, keep walking,” said Darren Hornbeck, a teacher at Linganore since 1987. ‘‘It’s worse at certain times than others...”

Teachers are especially easy on those students who walk to one of 21 ‘‘portable” classrooms set up in the back of the school.

More than 90 percent of Linganore students attend class in the portables, according to Hornbeck and school staff.

The hallways jam because all the lockers are inside the building, and students go back and forth from portables to lockers each day.

On March 7, the portable classroom Hornbeck had been using all year caught fire, and was left unusable. A heating unit sparked a fire on the roof, causing more than $50,000 in smoke damage. The classroom is structurally stable, but not fit for students, as Hornbeck continues to salvage items from it.

‘‘I have to wait until no one’s in the hallways to take things inside, otherwise I hear, ‘What’s that smoky smell?’” he said.

The school will likely replace the damaged classroom, but is in no rush to do so.

Hornbeck, the 2003 Maryland Teacher of the Year, splits his days at Linganore between social studies and staff development, and has spent most of his career teaching in portable classrooms.

When not teaching social studies, Hornbeck works with other teachers to develop new lesson plans and education methods.

Since the fire, Hornbeck has been wheeling most of his class materials around on a cart. Hornbeck’s only class found a home in a vacant classroom in the building.

It was fortunate, in a way, that his classroom, and not another, caught fire, he said. If another teacher’s portable had burned it would have taken a lot more juggling to find seats for the displaced students.

Hornbeck now uses the last remaining private room in the school, tucked into the main office.

‘‘I almost didn’t want the room, but I realized that I needed a place for my things,” he said. ‘‘I’m always willing to clear out if another teacher needs it.”

The remedy for crowding at Linganore High is Oakdale High School. Oakdale is on track to open in the fall of 2008 while Linganore High is rebuilt and renovated.

Linganore is now scheduled to reopen in 2012, pending county funding decisions.

‘‘There were a lot of disillusioned people when we heard that,” Principal Margaret Lyburn said. ‘‘So many people believed that the county commissioners would be true to their word.”

Teachers and students alike, Lyburn said, are looking forward to moving into Oakdale, even if portables are needed to handle the growing numbers there.

Hornbeck said the staff has done so well with the old Linganore High, that new facilities could only improve the education.

‘‘The portables, I think, send a message to students,” he said. ‘‘We tell them that their education is the most important thing for them now, and it is. But they see conditions that go against that statement.”

Students see, for example, expansive shopping malls and plush stadium-style seating in movie theaters. Many live in housing developments that look elegant and polished, he said. Then their education is presented with mostly unattractive portables.

‘‘They only go to high school once,” he said, and the portables can present a distraction to their education.

Hornbeck and Lyburn said that community interest in the portables has increased since the fire at the school.

They hope the new interest and support will help convince county commissioners to dig deep and find ways to finish the Linganore renovations as quickly as possible.

Hornbeck said that while the Linganore community has been patient with renovation plans and overcrowded hallways, he expects educators and parents to be more outspoken if the school conditions impact the quality of education.