COLUMBUS -- Excited voices and smiling faces, along with a few tearful goodbyes to moms, were seen as students trooped into Columbus elementary schools for the start of a new school year.
“The kids were smiling and excited to be back ... and there were a few tears. That’s a typical first day,’’ Centennial Elementary Principal Jackie Herink said about 8:30 a.m. after the first wave of the opening day rush ended.
Tears were hard to find this morning at North Park Elementary School as the school welcomed a record 67 kindergarten students at the sound of the first bell. The school had 50 kindergarten students last year.
“The kids were thrilled and ready to go,’’ North Park Principal Bob Hausmann said this morning. “I didn’t see any tears from kids ... I saw more tears from parents today.”
School got under way this morning at all five city elementary schools today. Students were arriving on staggered schedules today at the high school and middle school.
Kindergarten additions were completed at Centennial and North Park during the summer. A kindergarten addition at Emerson Elementary School is expected to be completed in late-September.
The music classroom at Emerson Elementary School was moved to the gymnasium on Tuesday to make space for a kindergarten class that has swollen from 49 students last spring to 63 today.
“They say, ‘If you build it, they will come,’ ’’ Emerson Principal Jeff Bartels said this morning. “Well, they’re here.”
The school’s kindergartners are split up into three classrooms. The extra class will occupy the music room for the next several weeks.
“No one’s put anything in stone, but we’re hoping for Sept. 15,’’ said Bartels, noting that two work crews were putting on the roof and laying bricks today.
The construction projects called for two kindergarten rooms with a shared activities space at Centennial, one kindergarten room, which will share an existing activities space at Emerson and a kindergarten room with a new activities space at North Park.
The kindergarten addition at Centennial allows the flow of students to go a little smoother in the morning. The school, which has five entrances, lines students up by grade level outside each entryway.
“We got everybody to the right door,’’ said Herink, adding that after the first couple of days of school students will get used to the routine of lining up and waiting for the opening bell.
First-day traffic congestion as parents dropped off their kids was normal at both schools.
North Park has a parent volunteer for traffic control, said Hausmann, who was scheduled to talk to students during a school-wide assembly this morning. Hausmann wanted to welcome the students and go over the school’s rules.
Traffic flow at Centennial is expected to improve in the days ahead. The school’s kindergarten addition added 24,000 square-feet of paved surface for 49 new parking spaces.
The added parking should be most helpful for the afternoon pickup when parents have crowded the school lot in the past. The parking lot has an added access point in the southeast corner.
“We’ll see how traffic flows this afternoon,’’ said Herink, who was too busy attending to students and parents to notice if traffic got congested during this morning’s student drop-off.
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