Central’s main elevator broke down on Tuesday, Aug. 29, forcing several classes on the third floor with students on crutches in wheelchairs to relocate or accommodate students who can no longer reach their classrooms.
The elevator was repaired on Aug. 30, a day before the replacement part needed to fix the elevator was expected to arrive.
Classes on the second floor did not need to make the same accommodations, as students can use the gymnastics elevator to reach rooms on the second floor. Some second floor classes relocated to the third floor in order to allow third floor math classes that need elevator access to take place on the second floor.
“If there was an open room on the second or first floor we placed [relocated third floor classes] there,” said Carrie McFadden, Assistant Principal for Operations. “There are a couple of periods – period three and seven, specifically – that there aren’t open classrooms. So we might be taking a math class and putting it in a comm arts class and taking the comm arts class and putting it up in the math classroom.”
While all math classes with students needing accommodation relocated, many science classes did not.
“We [tried] to relocate [science classes] when we can, but it is a little bit more dependent on what the [teacher’s] plan for that day is,” McFadden said. “Labs have to happen in lab classrooms, they can’t really happen in other rooms.”
In total, 15 classes were affected by the elevator closure.
This was the third time in Central’s school year that classes have been relocated: first with semester-long relocations due to the reconstruction of an exterior wall and then on Aug. 24 due to excessively hot classrooms.
This article was updated to reflect the completion of elevator repairs before they were planned.
