Gold, silver and black acoustical panels are already in the gym, showcasing the school colors and waiting on basketball players to arrive.
The black-box theater awaits student thespians, their lines memorized, spouting high school drama. The kind that’s assigned, that is.
And the band and locker rooms stand ready for the sounds of Friday night football victories.
Hartwood High School, one of three new schools Stafford is opening next fall, is coming along, on schedule and within budget, according to a recent tour given to reporters and a presentation to the county’s Board of Supervisors.
Hartwood High was about 75 percent complete when Stafford schools Superintendent Daniel Smith addressed the supervisors earlier this month.
It is designed to accommodate up to 2,150 students in grades 9 through 12, and it spans 292,000 square feet. That means it will be the largest high school in the county.
Michael Kelly will serve as Hartwood’s inaugural principal, and the stallion will be the school’s mascot.
The addition will alleviate crowding in every other high school, Smith told supervisors, and is coming in within its budget of $183.1 million.
“Opening three new schools in one year is a monumental lift,” Smith told the supervisors, “and we are tackling it with precision and intentionality. It’s so much more than just opening new school buildings and structures. It is a complete shift for our school system in our community.”
Hartwood High is scheduled to open with grades 9-11 only, as seniors at other schools will be able to stay and graduate from the school they have been attending.
The school system will add the equivalent of 37.3 employees to the new school at a cost of $3.6 million. Other positions will be filled by reassigning staff from existing schools, Smith told the supervisors.
Hartwood is three stories tall, and will have two wings.
“It’s a very well laid-out school,” Jason MacDonald, program manager for the construction of the three new schools, told reporters on the tour, “very easy to navigate.”
The school’s auditorium has a capacity of 1,000, which makes it the biggest in Stafford, while the main gym can seat 1,700. It also will have 737 parking spaces and 125 toilets.
The band room is in a part of the building near the football stadium, so members can process out to events, for example, and locker rooms are similarly situated for easy access for athletes.
Hartwood will also contain one of Stafford’s newest specialty centers, approved by the county School Board on Nov. 13.
The Arts, Media and Production, or AMP, Center will offer student coursework pathways in digital content production, live event management, audio engineering and production, and visual arts.
The idea is to prepare students to later be in the workforce, and Smith said the school division has seen a lot of job growth in AMP areas, especially in event, video and sound production.
To facilitate this learning, Hartwood contains sound booths for music, and, of course, that black-box theater.
From the classroom to the job site
Across the street from Hartwood High School is Falls Run Elementary School, which is also under construction. It and Crow’s Nest Elementary, which will be adjacent to Brooke Point High School, will open for the next school year, too.
Cody Wickline, a 2023 Stafford High School graduate, is working on Falls Run Elementary School, which will open next year.
And one of the people who has worked on the Falls Run school is Cody Wickline, a 2023 graduate of Stafford High School.
He was in the Bringing Occupational Opportunities to Students, or BOOTS, program at Stafford. That initiative gives students the opportunity to design and build houses, and now Wickline is helping to construct a school.
He said his favorite part is getting to run different machines while doing site work for the school.
“You know, coming out here, doing this, it’s a whole lot of fun,” Wickline said to reporters on the Hartwood tour.
