To combat classroom shortages at Medea Creek Middle School, new classrooms will be installed this semester on the upper black-top area, near the field.

Much like the rooms that make up the i-building at Oak Park High School, these rooms will be assembled elsewhere and delivered to the school.

“We’re going to get six new classrooms that are up on the [blacktop]. We’re hugely excited about it. The preliminary steps should start by the end of this month of January, [and we hope they will be] up and ready for fabulous classroom use by the fall term so that would be August,” MCMS Assistant Principal Amanda Bagheri said.

The new classrooms will be for a specific subject and grade level.

“For now, it looks like the seventh-grade humanities teachers have elected to move up there … We really wanted to cluster around a subject area or grade level, and so we’ll be doing that,” Bagheri said.

These new classrooms are necessary because of overcrowding; the administration is hoping that this will decrease the number of teachers sharing classrooms and alleviate some of the crowding.

“For probably close to 10 years, we have had people teach more than their assigned load, which I know goes on at the high school [as well] because we were short on classrooms,” Bagheri said. “So it would be hard to bring in people to do those extra classes because we have nowhere to put them. It’s been a long-standing need that we have had for more classroom space.”

The layout of these classrooms has not yet been finalized; however, there is a preliminary plan for how they will be arranged.

“There will be six of them so it’ll be a different look than what’s [at the high school], and they’ll be clustered; [two buildings, each with three rooms],” Bagheri said, “Then, there will be a courtyard in the middle, so it will look different than the ones that the high school, but I think the concept of the buildings is the same.”

Also, like the i-building at OPHS, these new classrooms at MCMS will be environmentally friendly.

“The classrooms that will be new additions to Medea Creek will be made out of recycled materials,” Bagheri said.