Concord’s new schools feature efficient, unusual desks

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Some face each other in small groups at the new Concord elementary schools. Others wiggle in a crooked line. Some make up a semicircle. Others stand alone.

No, not the students at recess. The desks in the classrooms.

They resemble the desks you probably grew up with – tan-colored tops, an indented slot for a pen and a wire bin for books and other miscellany. But they’re shaped like trapezoids, not rectangles. And it’s allowing teachers to switch things up.

“We just changed it yesterday,” Casey Ireland said Tuesday morning of her fourth-graders’ desk arrangement. “We had groups, and groups weren’t working.”

Ireland asked her 20-or-so students to raise their hands if they preferred their side-by-side lines facing the board.

Almost all the hands went up.

Some teachers and students are still adjusting, but Abbot-Downing Principal Deb McNeish said the new design has allowed for a more efficient and effective use of space.

“It facilitates the teacher getting around the classroom easily and touching base with any child that they need to very quickly,” she said. “Whether it’s positive or negative.”

The desks are widest where the students sit and grow narrower by roughly a foot at the other end.

McNeish and others said the desks’ angles fit better into circles and just about any other shape that’s conducive to watching a teacher at the head

of the class or working with a partner.

“You couldn’t have a horseshoe with a rectangle,” McNeish said after visiting a classroom where most of the students were at desks arranged into horseshoes and a few were working independently.

Walk through Abbot-Downing, for example, and you’ll see desks in rows both parallel and perpendicular to the board, groups that form a rhombus and semicircles.

Fifth-grade teacher Kathleen Sullivan said she’s tried about half a dozen configurations so far. On Tuesday, her desks were in a few long rows facing the board. Most of the desks didn’t exactly line up with one another, giving the lines a wave-like appearance.

Slightly staggering the desks makes it a little harder for students to be distracted by a neighbor but still allows them to work together when necessary. The configuration is also a more effective use of space, Sullivan said.

“I don’t think they could fit in a straight line,” she said.

It’s been a little frustrating, she said, to abandon the clear lines that rectangles allowed.

Officials said the district considered a range of new desks last year as they were finishing the new schools, which the district borrowed $55 million to complete. McNeish said some of the desks were “just plumb weird.”

They wanted to do something innovative, MeNeish said, and these desks were a good fit. It seems they might be a better fit for the younger students than the older ones, though.

The desk tops have enough space for some papers, a pencil case and a water bottle. For younger students, that’s plenty. For some older students, that’s not always enough space for what they need. Moreover, because the bins under the desk also lack right-angled corners, it can be difficult for students to fit all their materials inside. That’s less of a problem for the younger students than the older ones who have clunkier text books. So far, some students use bins assigned to them to store excess material.

But, McNeish said, the smaller bins have big benefits.

“The old closed desks, the regular desks, things could live in there for quite awhile,” she said. “Mold, mildew, leftover lunches.”

Much has been made of the new schools’ break-out areas, use of natural light, advanced acoustics and electronic whiteboards. But, McNeish says, the desks have done their part to allow teachers more flexibility.

“It makes for a very friendly room,” she said.

(Molly A.K. Connors can be reached at 369-3319 or mconnors@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @MAKConnors )