Salvaging the school: what happens to our current building after students leave?

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Owen Adams

Student’s tried to clean the lockers to make them easier to reuse after color wars

As Lincoln prepares to move into its new building this coming year, one might be left wondering, what is going to happen to our current building? 

According to Business Manager Jill Ross, it’s a pretty straightforward procedure.  A contractor hired by the Bond project, which is funding the new building, will form a team to comb through Lincoln. They will look for anything usable and sell it to schools in Portland, other states or maybe even countries.

This means lockers get taken off the walls, wood paneling gets recycled, metal railings get sold and anything that won’t be used in the new building or sold is given a new home. The team will then use the money made to add to the funding for our new school.

Senior Magdalena Marban is part of the senior class cabinet and helped clean up the painted lockers after class competition to make them easier to repurpose.  

“We were cleaning the lockers off because [Lincoln] is supposedly selling them when we move to the new building,” Marban said. “It was hard and annoying because there was paint everywhere and a lot of it didn’t even come off.”

There are some things that can’t be recycled or bought from the bond project. These things will likely find themselves in landfills according to Ross. This whole process has been done by many schools including West Sylvan Middle School, which is filled with second-hand lockers.  

Some items from pre-construction Lincoln are going to be taken to Lincoln’s new campus. There are general classroom things that teachers will bring over, but one unorthodox item is the old Sequoia tree that used to sit on the edge of Lincoln’s football field.  Lincoln cut it down to make room for the new building, and instead of trying to sell the wood or sending it elsewhere, they milled it and turned it into the library desk in the new building.

Ms. Ross is excited to see our new school building, and our old one is sure not to go to waste.