Classes start at Camp Five
Charles H. Featherstone/Columbia Basin Herald Krystal Trammell stands outside Chief Moses Middle School welcoming students to Camp Five, a mini-campus for fifth-graders from Garden Heights and Lakeview Terrace elementary schools.
MOSES LAKE — Camp Five sounds like the name of a far-flung military outpost somewhere in the deserts of western Iraq, where soldiers hunker down to keep the peace and defend freedom.
Instead, these three modular buildings behind Chief Moses Middle School are the new — and hopefully temporary — home of the Garden Heights and Lakeview elementary schools fifth grades.
“We’re very excited,” said Krystal Trammell, counselor at Camp Five, after greeting the fifth-graders as they got off their buses Wednesday morning. “It’s a new grade, a new campus, but there’s some familiarity to this.”
Camp Five is a part of the effort by the Moses Lake School District to deal with the sheer number of students filling the schools while they wait for last February’s $135 million school construction bond to clear the courts and for construction, especially of the district’s 11th elementary school, to begin.
“This is temporary; it will last for two years until a new elementary school is built. We’re still trying to stay on track with that,” said Cheri Ward, the assistant principal as Garden Heights who is also overseeing Camp Five.
Ward said the kids at Camp Five will still start and end their school days, as well as do some special activities — such as music, computer labs, and library — at their home elementary schools.
What they won’t be doing is interacting much with the middle schoolers, Ward said. Camp Five students will have their own schedules, including their own recess time.
“Kids will stay connected to their home schools, and they will start their days there,” Ward said. “And then about 3:15, they’ll take the bus back to their home schools.”
“These kids are not going home from Chief Mo,” she added.
Ward said the kids themselves — last year’s fourth-graders who would be attending the temporary mini-campus — voted for the name “Camp Five.”
Parents of Camp Five kids will also be kept informed of the latest goings on through a special school schedule (both the Lakeview Terrace and Garden Heights web pages link to Camp Five) as well the Remind app, Ward said.
Camp Five should be in business for the next two years, if all goes according to plan, Ward said.
But today, it was the first day of school for these fifth-graders in a not-so-far-flung outpost.
“They made it!” said Trammell. “They smiled, we got hugs, and they are in their rooms!”
Charles H. Featherstone can be reached via email at countygvt@columbiabasinherald.com.