This past fall, Community High School has made some alterations to its fitness space without much explanation. Bodley Hall, previously used for Personal Fitness classes, was recently cleared of workout equipment, which was all moved to the dance studio on the first floor. Now, the studio is being used for Personal Fitness, Dance Body and Weight Training classes, while students and staff are still unclear about the fate of Bodley.

“All I’ve heard is that Bodley is being transformed into a new counseling office,” said Chloe Kurihara, a Personal Fitness student. “I don’t know what will happen to the old office in that case. As far as my Personal Fitness class is concerned, we’re doing the same kind of workouts as we did in Bodley.”

Dean Marci Tuzinsky has laid out some rudimentary plans for what Bodley will look like in the future.

“This isn’t permanent because we might have to take a different direction, but the plan right now is to move the counseling office in there so that [the counselors] have an entire Career, Counseling and Wellness Center,” Dean Marci said. The space could include both a small private office for individual or confidential meetings and a bigger area for a conference table and college presentations. There could also be couches for students to sit by the fireplace and relax, as well as computers for working on college applications.

This shift is all part of a much bigger push to improve the use of space in the school.

“Space is imperative…every teacher here is so darn creative, and uses this building and the space in such an amazing way with what little we have,” Dean Marci said. “We barely even have enough room for all of our staff.”

Community does not have the resources, like auditoriums, gyms and career centers, that big high schools like Huron, Pioneer and Skyline do. We barely even have enough room for all of our staff. This has spurred the dean to initiate some changes in the set-up of Community.

“I had a district team come in with an architect to look at our space and our use of space to figure out what we could do to better help and accommodate all the teachers and their needs and what we needed to do, and we shared several of our problems,” Dean Marci said.

These problems included the sharing of rooms between teachers, which makes it hard for students to find teachers after class if they need to talk to them.

One of the worst rooms for sharing space is the ILC, which is currently used by six adults: five teachers and a school social worker. Often, two different programs are being held in the same room at the same time. This also threatens the confidentiality of conversations between the social worker and students.

Staff members also need more meeting space in general; right now, the only conference room is 222, which is also the prop and costume room for CET during shows. In addition, many students have Individualized Education Program (IEP) meetings or are a part of Cognitive Behavioral Theory (CBT) groups, which require multiple meeting areas at once.

When the district team came to look at the school, they also analyzed the schedule to see what adjustments could be made. They found that Bodley Hall is only used during three out of eight blocks, and the studio only two. Additionally, the studio has twice the square footage of Bodley, not all of which is needed for Dance Body and Weight Training. This new shift allows the school to open up more room and hopefully solve some of the space issues.

“What worries me is the other non-Personal Fitness related things happening in the dance studio,” Kurihara said. There are a ton of bikes and weights taking up the space.” She hopes to take the reinstated Dance Body CR next semester. “The studio is definitely enough space for [Personal Fitness], but I preferred the class being up in Bodley Hall.”

Dean Marci said that the possible future adjustments will not be made without considering the concerns of staff and students.

“I want there to be some visioning here by the staff about our needs and about exactly what it’ll look like,” Dean Marci said. She plans to get student input as well and make sure that changes work for everyone before they become permanent.