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	Photo by Bill Green West Frederick Middle School teacher Kaye Stefanick helps students find their buses as they leave the school after the first day in the building, which was renovated over the summer. The school, built in 1958, is about 70 percent of the way through a comprehensive renovation.

"It's amazing," the 12-year-old said. "It kind of makes me feel like I'm in a brand-new school."

And she is, kind of, in a brand-new school.

West Frederick , built in 1958, is about 70 percent of the way through a comprehensive renovation that will leave little of the building in its original condition. The gym floor, still in great condition, is being refurbished. But that, and exterior walls, may be all that remains of the 1950s part of the school when the project is finished next summer, Principal Dan Lippy said Monday.

The total project budget was $43 million. Of that, construction was $30 million.

Lippy is familiar with West Frederick . Now in his third year at the helm of the middle school, he also taught at the school for five years and was a West Frederick Middle student himself in the mid-1980s.

"My aunt was the lead custodian here when I was a student," he said.

The former hallways made of dark "institutional" green blocks are covered with bright white, black and gold tiles. Classrooms are warm and inviting, Lippy said, and outfitted with the latest technology.

"Every classroom has a Promethean board," he said of new, state-of-the-art electronic whiteboards. "And there's a document camera in each class also."

The electronic boards are interactive and allow teachers to run their computers through them. Language arts teacher Ning Chu demonstrated how a special stylus can be used like a computer mouse to click through different menus to project lessons and other information for students to see.

West Frederick is unique in that it has three grades of students who are trying to maneuver around a new school.

This year's sixth-graders are just in a school new to them. The seventh-graders spent their first year of middle school in portable classrooms in the center of a construction site. Eighth-graders spent a year in the old building and a year in portables prior to being the big kids on the new campus.

Media specialist Laura Hicks said she's in heaven with a new library that's "well over three times as large as what we had."

In addition to a large instructional area and plenty of book stacks, the new media center boasts a 32-unit computer lab with new computers hooked up just in time for the start of school.

The cafeteria has been completely redone, with an additional food service line that will allow children more time to eat while spending less time in line to get their meals.

And in a nod to the environment, West Frederick is going to stop using Styrofoam lunch trays and return to the hard, reusable ones.

Two additional phases of renovation work are under way, Lippy said. A block of nine classrooms are slated to be finished by January, and four classrooms and the remaining work should be done by next August.

The school community has worked hard to accommodate the renovations, Lippy said. School life in portable classrooms wasn't always easy, but the consensus is that the outcome was worth the sacrifice.

"The toughest part will be to lose the gym," Lippy said. "We'll lose that in April for the rest of the school year."

Health Room Technician Joe Weedon, who said he'd already had about five customers by 1:30 p.m., was sitting in a new suite with rooms for student privacy, office space and storage space.

Prior to the renovation, Weedon had a cot, desk and chair crammed into a small space on the school's stage.

While the entire school's routine is off, Lippy said it won't take long to settle in to the new space and new routines.

"This is a fresh start, the dawning of a new age of West Frederick Middle School," Lippy said. "We're on the cutting edge."

The educators are armed with the latest in technology and other resources and they're working overtime to train themselves on the new equipment. That's because, Lippy said, the goal of everyone at West Frederick is to translate the latest cutting-edge equipment into improved student achievement.

"And we're going to do that," the principal said.