New Lower School Building: Becoming Not New; Learning to be a More Secure Campus

For years to come, we will be celebrating the community accomplishment represented by our 2025 version of the Annie Richardson Bass Lower School building. The ribbon-cutting event of January 13, 2025, was a high-tide moment for us all. (You might have read enough of my gushing about the new building. Perhaps you could watch this wonderful video our communications team put together of the event.)

The day after that ribbon-cutting, the kids started to make scuff marks, and the teachers found things that needed to be changed or fixed. The scuffs and the goofs are to celebrate. We are not living in a gallery or a museum. Our Lower School is a lived-in space that, most importantly, needs to serve the learning needs of our students and the teaching needs of our faculty. 

After a week of truly remarkable “nesting” by our first through fourth grade faculty after winter break, the new building already belonged to the Classes of 2034, ’35, ’36 and ’37. Their names were on the art and on the homework posters on the walls. Their seats, though brand new furniture, were all labeled with their names. Their coats were left hanging on the hallway’s quirky coat hooks. But the building was still a bit too pristine. We did not suddenly become a 60-year-old building like the one we left behind, but we did become a place where mud will be tracked, and spills will happen. 

Part of the “new” of our Lower School building is a higher level of security than we are accustomed to. The Lower School is locked, and access is granted by Sherrilan Gilley at the front reception area. We also added the controlled access features to our Butler Kindergarten Building over the break. Beverly Michael lets visitors into this building. We will never be able to say we have a fully secured campus, but the Butler Building and the new Lower School building’s one entrance and controlled access requiring a buzz-in or a card take us to a different level of security than we have had anywhere else on campus. 

That security is clearly a good thing, but it does come at a cost. Because of the fear of violence like we have seen on television at schools across the country, we have seen fit to add these security measures. We have not had a tragic act of violence on our campus, and yet our newest building responds to tragedies elsewhere. If you’ve flown on a commercial plane since 2001, you know that a single day’s violence overhauled how we approach every plane jetway ever since. 

With our new building and specifically its limited access to the inside and to the outside on our playground (which is surrounded by a fence and secure gates), we can wonder if we have gone too far. The innocence of open access, in 60 years and no act of violence, has a significant appeal. We can miss that innocence. We can have a false sense of having eliminated all risk. In these early days of the new circumstances, we are adjusting. We are perhaps normalizing this new security. If it feels inaccessible, is that good or bad? The community came together to make the new building possible. But is the new building breaking down that sense of community? I certainly hope not. We will continue to weigh the pros and cons, working toward hopefully finding an elusive happy middle ground between our homes and airport security.