BEVERLY — The old Beverly High School sat in an eerie state of silent chaos this week.
Fluorescent orange crates, filled and ready for shipment, were scattered through the halls. Abandoned lockers, their doors swung open and forgotten; loose sheets of lined paper; piles of textbooks; tangled wire; and even a skateboard gave the halls a faint heartbeat. But everyone knows the plug will soon be pulled.
After Beverly High's 1,300 students went home Monday afternoon, teachers and movers prepared to abandon the building forever. On Tuesday, classes will all be held in the gleaming, new $80 million facility next door — and the old Beverly High School will be razed. As if the old building knew it, the halls seemed almost sad Tuesday as the last few straggling teachers worked diligently to pack up whatever could be salvaged and brought next door.
Since it opened in 1964, thousands of students and teachers have passed through its corridors, and the sheer length of service has produced a lot of stuff.
"Rooms like this have been used by any number of people — over the years there must have been 10 different teachers in here," said Nancy Schalch, an engineering teacher at the school. The conspicuous orange crates — which have color-coded labels for accurate transport — were piled four high, and various knickknacks were scattered on the lab tables.
"There's lots of stuff in the nooks and crannies," Schalch said, pulling out of a closet a test tube that had some strange crystallized substance on the bottom. "It all needs to be sorted out. We'll take what's useful and leave everything else."
For Pam Gouglan, the task is even more complicated. As a school technology specialist, she doesn't just have one classroom to worry about, but all the computers, surge protectors, routers and hodgepodge of wiring strewed throughout the building.
"It's been pretty funny," Gouglan said, from a room filled with boxes of cords, wires, hard drives and gizmos. "There were no computers when this building was built, so everything was brought in and installed piecemeal."
Gouglan and her helpers spent more than a week — sometimes as many as 10 hours a day — going through the school and pulling down all the wiring that was patched together during the last 60 years of technological advancement.
"It's a whole different scenario in the new building. ... There's more bandwidth, all the wires are hidden, and everything is coordinated," she said. "We're going from a real state of confusion to controlled chaos."
Controlled chaos seemed to be a fair description of the move itself. Although much had been accomplished by Wednesday, there was much left to do before classes begin next week.
"It's looking fine. Things are moving along well," Superintendent Marie Galinski said midday Tuesday. "I think that many of the teachers thought that (the move) would be a bigger undertaking than it actually is."
For one thing, barely any furniture is being moved from one school to the other. Almost all of the furniture in the new school is new and has already been installed. Books, personal items, lab equipment, technology and paperwork were the main things making the trip. Anything not needed will be left behind to be disposed of or claimed by other district schools or offices. Some of it, like the library bookshelves and perhaps the stove and refrigerator in the culinary department, will be sold.
However, "some of it is not really worth anything; it's 60 years old," Galinski said.
The old building will be turned over to the construction company on Nov. 30. After that, the workers will strip the building of anything valuable or dangerous, like asbestos, and then it will be demolished and turned into a parking lot.
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