New Southeast High sports improvements big and small

English teacher Tracy Catlin says her favorite thing about the new Southeast High School hasn’t arrived yet.

“The kids,” she said. “Seeing how they react to it, and how they have everything that’s new. … We’ve got the best for the best.”

When Southeast High students start school next week they will be at a new, $68 million building at 127th Street East and Pawnee, the first new comprehensive high school to open in Wichita in nearly four decades.

Principal Lori Doyle led a tour Thursday of the new high school, which was designed by Schaefer Johnson Cox Frey Architecture and built by Dondlinger Construction.

The massive structure rises out of pastureland in the far southeast corner of the city, 330,000 square feet of blond brick and glass adorned with plenty of Southeast High’s signature black and gold buffalo logos.

Doyle and her colleagues are thrilled with the major improvements, including a 2,400-seat main gym with a walking track, a 900-seat auditorium with modern stage rigging, and a swimming and diving pool that eclipses the old school’s tattered and time-worn facility.

But it’s the small touches she really loves to show off – like a door that connects the instrumental music room to the floor of the main gymnasium, so pep band players can load up, walk a few paces and start playing.

She loves the natural light that washes through windows, hallway alcoves that give students a place to gather during lunch, and a tunnel that connects locker rooms to outdoor practice fields.

“Our job is to get students prepared for whatever they choose to do after they leave us,” Doyle said. “A big focus of our building is college and career, so we have these open hallways with that type of environment.”

A grant from the federal Magnet Schools Assistance Program will help establish four career-focused “schools” within Southeast: a school of performance art; a school of entrepreneurship and communication; a school of civic leadership; and a school of science, technology, engineering and math, which will include new courses in agriculture and agribusiness.

A two-story Tech Ed Plaza includes art classes, business computer labs, a Project Lead the Way engineering suite, media production rooms, agriculture classrooms and more, all visible from the east-side atrium through glass walls.

“That’s deliberate,” Doyle explained.

Students gathered outside or walking by “might see something cool going on inside and say, ‘What class is that? I want to take that,’ ” she said. “Maybe it would pique their interest.”

Doyle said school officials plan to spend the first day of classes “doing an intensive orientation of the building,” not just for freshmen but for upperclassmen as well.

“We are going to take time so everyone feels comfortable knowing where things are located,” she said.

Here’s a tip: Wear comfortable shoes. The building is a quarter-mile long from east to west – so long that Doyle has added a full minute to the passing period to give students enough time to navigate between classes.

Since moving into the building about three weeks ago, Doyle said she has averaged between 5 1/2 and 6 miles of walking a day. Teachers joke that between the school’s hallways, stairways, walking track, weight room and pool, they could drop their gym memberships and still get a great workout.

“It is very 21st-century,” said Catlin, the English teacher. “It is fast-paced. It is athletic.”

An outdoor athletic complex includes a turf field and nine-lane track, eight tennis courts and practice fields for football, baseball, softball and soccer. Plans for a varsity football stadium, however, as proposed in the original 2008 bond issue plan, are on hold.

District leaders have said the new high school could draw some families back to Wichita from nearby private and suburban schools. Early enrollment numbers show that may be happening:

Nearly 1,800 students have enrolled to attend Southeast this fall, Doyle said, compared with about 1,600 who were enrolled at the end of last school year.

How those students will adjust to the new environment – and how the school will manage traffic flow both inside and outside the building – is still a question. Fifty-five buses will serve Southeast High each morning and afternoon.

“We’re going to have to live it,” Doyle said, and make adjustments as needed.

“They’re going to come, and we’ll just watch how they maneuver through. … We’re going to watch the kids and see what they do.”

This story was originally published August 18, 2016 at 6:40 PM with the headline "New Southeast High sports improvements big and small."