Exterior rendering of Green Bay's new elementary school, January 2025. (Image courtesy of Green Bay Area Public School District)
GREEN BAY, WI (WTAQ-WLUK) — Green Bay residents were presented with the final designs of the new west side elementary school.
The new school is the centerpiece of a $183 million referendum that 66% of voters supported last election.
For the 2026-’27 school year, three elementary schools will be consolidating into one, single-story, new building next where Kennedy Elementary currently sits at 7th Street and Chantel Street.
According to the informational session led by Green Bay Area Public Schools Chief Operations Officer Cale Pulczinski, the school will be broken into six pods of four classrooms. The pods will be divided by grade level from kindergarten to 5th grade.
The new elementary school will have all rooms on one floor. Melanie Parma, Senior Vice President, Director of Client Relations, and Education Studio Leader at Somerville Architects and Engineers said, “We reacted with thoughtful design to create this new building which started with everything on one floor, from an accessibility perspective and understanding how all the students will experience the building.”
The district will showcase the school’s branding sometime next month. Pulczinski said, “We’re going to continue to get that input from our staff, potentially the community as well in that branding piece. The school does not have a name yet, that’s coming in March as well as a mascot.”
The driving lanes and parking lot will be bigger at the new school to accommodate having more parents at one school during drop off and pick up times.
Many of the interior parts of the design were influenced by staff input, including locker layouts and bathroom locations. Similarly, to address security concerns more safety glass has been added to the design and the layout was adjusted to improve safety protocols, such as if there were an intruder.
Pulczinski added that a lot of the feedback the district received along the way was helpful because it reinforced options they were considering already.
A lot of the pieces that were brought up in I would say the community sessions and the staff sessions, we had already considered incorporating into the design so a lot of that had already been in our minds to get in there. So it was nice to see that alignment with our design team and then our staff and community as well.
Green Bay Area Public Schools plan on breaking ground on the new school in May.
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