Lake Sybelia gets $11M renovation

In the spirit of Halloween, the students in Maria Avila’s fourth-grade class at Lake Sybelia Elementary School spent much of Friday’s class gutting pumpkins in their upstairs classroom.

Two years ago, they were carving pumpkins in portables behind the school.

Now, after an almost $11 million renovation project, the ground where those portables once stood reveals a restored basketball court and softball field.

Two years after breaking ground, the elementary school now boasts a 25,000-square-foot addition to its 43-year-old, two-story building that includes major technological advances and spaces dedicated to the advancement of their unique program for deaf and partially deaf students.

“Our biggest upgrade was technology,” Principal Julie Paradise said.

Going high tech

Visit www.lakesybelia.ocps.net for more information on the renovations or the deaf and hard of hearing program.

High-tech interactive boards have taken over for old-fashioned dry-erase boards in every classroom.

“We kindergarten teachers were dragged kicking and screaming saying we don’t need that,” kindergarten teacher Kathie Olsen said. “And now we can’t go a day without it.”

These boards are comparable in size to dry erase boards but project the teacher’s computer screen and have touch-screen features that require only a pen to work.

The classrooms’ new dot cams, another projection technology that makes overhead projectors a thing of the past, are exciting in terms of classroom management, Olsen said, as they can project any item onto the interactive board so that the children can see it from anywhere in the classroom.

The interactive boards also double as televisions, playing the morning announcements, and come with microphones that the teachers wear around their necks on a lanyard — and they are creating quite the buzz at the elementary school.

“You wonder how we ever lived without those,” music teacher Cathy Kies said. “We’ve gotten so used to it.”

Advancing deaf program

In addition to the interactive board and dot cams, Lake Sybelia’s program for deaf and partially deaf students, the only one of its kind in Orange County, also received technological updates that will push the total-communication program forward.

The school received two observation rooms where interns, students and potential teachers can watch the teachers — without interrupting the classroom — as they communicate verbally and through sign language with the students.

“All of our teachers are wonderful,” Paradise said. “But what those teachers do for the students is really amazing.”

The 25,000-square-foot addition has also provided the program with an audiology booth that rids the school of the need to transport the students elsewhere for testing, saving more time for the 42 deaf and partially deaf students to learn how to communicate.

“It’s supposed to be the latest and the greatest,” Paradise said, “which they deserve.”

Already overflowing

Lake Sybelia also gained a media center with a story room and computer lab, a patio and a revamped kindergarten playground decorated with engineered mulch on which students in wheelchairs can maneuver freely.

Despite the new additions, Lake Sybelia Elementary has already outgrown itself, and Paradise is seeking to bring back two portables to house the speech and language students who are in the conference room and the music class that practices in the new upstairs computer lab.

“You just keep figuring out how to make it work,” Paradise said. “And I thank goodness the teachers here are usually very flexible.”

Still, spirits are high at Lake Sybelia Elementary as reflected by the lines of children waving their fingers in passing as they headed from one part of the renovated building to another.

“It is the best place to come to work every day,” Paradise said.