H.B.’s Lake View Elementary reopens after 2-year asbestos-related closure
After being closed for two years for asbestos abatement and campus upgrades, Lake View Elementary School in Huntington Beach reopened its doors to 323 students Wednesday morning for the first day of the 2016-17 school year.
The campus held a grand-reopening ceremony for students, teachers and parents and classroom tours for them to see the renovations.
Lake View is one of three elementary schools in the Ocean View School District that were closed in October 2014 when small amounts of asbestos were discovered in classrooms during a modernization project that started in July that year at 11 campuses.
When the schools were built decades ago, asbestos was used for fireproofing on metal beams above the ceilings. Over time, dust from the asbestos began to fall from the beams and onto classroom ceiling tiles.
In fall 2014, construction crews began working to remove the asbestos from Lake View, Hope View and Oak View elementary schools, all in Huntington Beach.
When the campuses closed, more than 1,600 students were bused to schools as far away as Buena Park. Some were placed in other schools in the Ocean View district.
“It was really hard,” said Alejandra Aguilar, whose son Joshua Aguilar was attending Lake View as a third-grader when the school closed in 2014. “My son had been here since kindergarten, and we’d just go across the street to drop him off at school.”
Joshua and Aguilar’s younger son Justin Dlao, who was going to start kindergarten at Lake View in 2014, instead attended Westmont Elementary School in Westminster, more than a mile from their house, during Lake View’s closure.
But on Wednesday morning, Aguilar walked Justin to his first day of school at Lake View.
“It’s a big relief just because having everything here is more convenient,” Aguilar said. “The school is close to our house and if he’s sick, I don’t have to go very far to get him.”
Lake View was the last of the three closed schools to reopen.
Hope View’s fourth- and fifth-graders returned to portable classrooms on campus in February 2015. The rest of the school reopened the following September.
All of Oak View’s students returned to the campus in portable classrooms last September. The school’s main building reopened several months later.
The cost to the district for the asbestos abatement and upgrades at Lake View was more than $5 million, according to Supt. Carol Hansen.
The cost for the work at all three schools totaled more than $15 million.
“We’ve gotten our footing and now everyone’s back to a normal place,” Hansen said.
After Lake View students met their teachers in the classrooms Wednesday, they went out to the front of the school to join Hansen, district board members, City Council members and about 200 parents for the reopening ceremony. Principal Jamie Goodwyn welcomed families back to the school, and several students helped cut a red ribbon with big scissors.
Lake View — which starting this school year will focus on a science, technology, engineering, art and math, or STEAM, curriculum — offered parents a tour of the revamped campus.
Seventeen classrooms have a Promethean panel to help with instruction. The panels look similar to widescreen TVs and have touch screens for teachers and children to use.
The school is one of the first in the country to have the latest version of the Promethean panel, according to Andrew Byer, vice president of education solution sales at Promethean, based in Alpharetta, Ga.
The screens can offer different activities, such as digital frog dissections, Byer said.
Twitter: @AlexandraChan10
