Administrators for Suffolk’s public school system are eagerly anticipating the availability in July 2018 of two new schools to serve children in North Suffolk. It’s likely that the teachers, faculty and parents whose students and children will benefit from construction of the new facilities are even more eager.

The fact that the wait for two brand new schools is “only” two and a half years is due to a bit of savvy decision-making on the part of the city’s School Board and SPS administrators, who have agreed to modify off-the-shelf designs for the new facilities, rather than create them completely from scratch.

A new middle school to be located in the Burbage Grant area will be modeled after Page Middle School in Gloucester, and the Driver-area elementary school that will be built on the site of the existing Florence Bowser Elementary School will be modeled after Suffolk’s own Hillpoint and Pioneer elementary schools.

Both sets of prototype designs will be modified to accommodate more students, but the finished schools will look very much like the ones upon which the designs are based upon.

The trade-off was a smart choice. Overcrowding at John Yeates Middle School is the stuff of local legend, and students there today navigate between the brick-and-mortar, circa-1965 building and 17 mobile units located on its grounds. The Burbage Grant middle school will complement Yeates, rather than replace it, meaning that school populations in both facilities should be smaller, at least for the short term.

The new elementary school will take the place of two aging facilities, Florence Bowser and Driver elementary schools. The biggest problems in those buildings is their age, and a new facility will give all 800 or so students there access to modern technology and design standards that are especially important at the elementary level.

It would have been unnecessary and time consuming to reinvent the middle and elementary school concepts for Suffolk. Kudos to school officials for recognizing what was most important and keeping their eyes on that goal.