Millennium Middle
School is the Seminole County’s first new school in eight years, and it will open Friday, when nearly 68,000 Seminole students head back to classes.
Cardboard boxes were stacked in her office, the gym’s floor was wet with wax, and workers with hardhats were still finishing up projects all around the campus.
But Principal Margaret Gunderson knew that by this week, the new Millennium Middle School would be wowing students, parents and teachers.
“They’re going to amazed,” she said.
Millennium, which sits just outside Sanford, is the Seminole County school district’s first new school in eight years. It will open for classes on Friday, when nearly 68,000 Seminole students head back to school.
The new school, which sits next door to Midway Elementary School, means a new campus for about 1,600 students and marks the 20th anniversary of the school district’s efforts to reinvent a once-derided middle be school.
Millennium’s old campus, about three miles away, will become the ninth-grade center for neighboring Seminole High School — which, with more than 3,300 students, was outgrowing its campus. It has been renamed the Edward Blacksheare Campus after a longtime local educator.
The new Millennium was designed to accommodate the school’s fine arts and communications magnet program, which provides typical arts options but also classes in ballet, drum line, musical theater and puppetry, among others. The campus includes numerous art and music classrooms, dance studios and an 800-seat auditorium.
“This showstopper right here,” Gunderson said as she walked into the auditorium, “it’s just going to blow their minds.”
But she expects students will also like the small brightly decorated spaces — some dubbed “creativity studios” — in the classroom building where they can work together on projects outside traditional classrooms, the charging stations in the cafeteria and the gym with its shiny floor.
Superintendent Walt Griffin said the new campus has made the B-rated school even more popular. Many people have called this summer, he said, asking, “How do we get into the new art school?”
That’s a sea change from 20 years ago. Back in 1998, Millennium was known as Lakeview Middle School and was a place families often avoided, if they could. Enrollment was low and academic performance lagged.
The U.S. Justice Department, which had sued the school district nearly 30 years earlier for running segregated schools, made improving Lakeview a requirement, if the district wanted out from its federal desegregation order. It noted the school