Harford County officials revealed plans this week for the new Bel Air High School, which will have a design very similar to Aberdeen High.
The new $62 million, 1,600-student facility will replace the existing school, which has been in use since the 1950s. The old school will be demolished once the new one is completed ? the projected date is fall 2009, said schools spokesman Don Morrison.
Now that the basic layout and site plan have been established, officials are working out the exact setup for classrooms, laboratories and other specifications.
“If the schematics are building the skeleton, then the educational specifications are putting the flesh on the skeleton,” Morrison said.
The plans for the school were tweaked slightly to reflect “lessons learned” at Aberdeen High, Morrison said, including a complete third floor to create more classrooms. The school will have 78 classroom spaces, including science labs, computer labs and a child development center.
“In changing classes, the way [the old] halls were laid out, it became a traffic jam,” said Principal Joseph Voskuhl. “The new design should have a much better flow.”
Seven classrooms will be dedicated to a magnet program for medical science, which could draw instructors from nearby hospitals, Morrison said.
Several more rooms on the second floor will create a separate area for ninth-graders, hopefully easing their transition into high school during a turbulent period in their lives when Morrison said schools typically start to see students dropping out.
The school will increase Bel Air?s capacity by more than 200 students, though the opening of Patterson Mill High School may offset the still-unknown number of new students coming into the county as the result of expansions at Aberdeen Proving Ground.
“It?s so hard to crystal-ball [enrollment], especially with BRAC coming,” Morrison said. “You can?t build based on what you think may come.”
The next obstacle, Morrison said, will be funding the project. Though County Executive David Craig had “forward-funded” the cost of the school by pledging county money mid-year, though no source of that money had yet been identified, Morrison said.
