After a devastating fire, the 100 year-old rebuild of Whatcom Middle School in Bellingham, Washington, is a great story of a jack-o-lantern school modernization. Changing the school from the inside-out, Whatcom now has all the modern conveniences of a new school and (even better) the seismic upgrades to make it resilient to the next earthquake, but it still has the same historical character of the school that was started in 1903.
However, almost half of America’s public school buildings are like Whatcom – they’re much older than you might think and built to educate the baby boomers – a generation that is now retiring from the workforce.