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At Aurora’s Laredo Elementary, the tidy library is shaped like a trapezoid because it used to be the auditorium.
And the cafeteria, which smelled of chicken nuggets on the first Friday of the school year, has basketball hoops hanging from the ceiling because it was once the multipurpose room.
Some classrooms don’t have windows. The brightly decorated hallways are narrow. And the fifth graders learn in trailers outside, which means the 10- and 11-year-olds must use a key card to bop into the main building whenever they have to use the bathroom.
The hodgepodge of spaces, as Principal Haleh Torbaghan affectionately calls it, is a result of several add-ons, expansions, and trying to shoehorn 21st century programming into a mid-20th century building. But all of that will soon change.
Using funding from a $1 billion bond measure passed by voters last November, Aurora Public Schools is planning to rebuild Laredo Elementary on the same plot of land where the circa-1967 building now stands in the western part of the city.
“The beauty of this rebuild is that it provides equity,” said Jen Koeppe, the director of construction management and support for Aurora Public Schools.
“We can’t just put all the new stuff where it’s developing,” she said, referring to new housing developments being built in the eastern part of Aurora.
As students across Colorado return to school this month, some districts are reaping the benefits of voter-approved tax measures. The $1 billion measure in Aurora was the largest school bond in state history, and it will pay for a variety of projects, including a renovation of Gateway High, the construction of new schools in growing east Aurora, and the rebuild of Laredo Elementary.
With about 450 students, Laredo is diverse. About 65% of students are Latino, 14% are Black, and 5% are Asian, Torbaghan said. Nearly 9 of 10 qualify for subsidized school meals, an indicator of poverty. And more than 60% are multilingual students learning English as a second language.
Laredo has a psychologist and social worker, a robust team of special education teachers and paraprofessionals, several math and reading interventionists, a health clinic, English and cooking classes for parents, and child care for younger siblings during those classes. But Torbaghan said the building doesn’t necessarily have the proper spaces to house all of the school’s programming.
Small or odd-shaped classrooms have been repurposed to serve as intervention spaces, with cloth dividers separating the rooms into several nooks. A lack of storage space means there are sometimes supplies piled in the hallways. The parent classes happen in the trailers outside.
“Just because it might be the underserved community, it doesn’t need to feel like that,” Torbaghan said. “They shouldn’t be used to having an old building.”
The new building will be two stories high, with taller ceilings and big windows that bathe the hallways and classrooms in natural light, Koeppe said. To allow for continued enrollment growth, the new school will have four classrooms per grade instead of the three it has now, plus a second all-day preschool classroom and a new STEM lab.
The parent classes will move inside, as will Laredo’s food pantry and free clothing bank. Torbaghan also envisions a space to host the school’s monthly parent coffee meetings, which she said consistently draw more than 30 families.
Laredo sits on a big plot of land, and the construction of the new school will happen while students are still attending the old one, which will eventually be torn down. The rebuild will cost an estimated $52 million, Koeppe said, and should be completed by the fall of 2027.
Torbaghan said she didn’t realize how much the design of a building mattered until she visited some newer schools where the classrooms were bright and the acoustics were pleasing.
“At first I was like, ‘Is that really going to matter?’” she said. “But after you see it in the schools, you’re like, ‘Oh man. Our kids really do need and deserve that.’”
That’s not to say there isn’t joy at Laredo now. Lyndy Huffman’s first grade class occupies one of the classrooms without windows. On Friday morning, her students gathered on the rug to listen to her read “We Don’t Eat Our Classmates,” a picture book about a dinosaur whose first day of school is complicated by the fact that she finds her human classmates delicious.
“Would you be surprised if a dinosaur came to your classroom?” Huffman asked her students.
“Noooo!” a chorus of kids said.
When Huffman looked surprised, a few students piped up with an enthusiastic “Yes!”
“Only a baby dinosaur,” one boy clarified.
Melanie Asmar is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Colorado. Contact Melanie at masmar@chalkbeat.org.