Kelly Cooper had just an hour to spare Friday afternoon, but she spent it making her pristine new classroom look like students had been there for years.

She had already hung students' artwork on the walls and a wreath on the door with a message saying all are loved in this classroom.

She wanted the new space at Garfield Community Learning Center to feel warm and welcoming, "for our students to feel like it's not a blank canvas."

In a way, the school itself is a blank canvas, with construction and maintenance staff putting the finishing touches on signage and the gym floor but with students yet to grace the hallways and make it their own.

Akron Public Schools will open Garfield CLC, located at 1326 Brown St., to the public on Saturday from 1-3 p.m. for a ribbon-cutting and tours. Students begin arriving Monday for the fall semester.

Garfield is the 34th and the last of the community learning centers built through a partnership between the city of Akron, the state of Ohio and Akron Public Schools.

Deb Foulk, executive director of business affairs for the district, has overseen the projects for nearly two decades. While the district still has several schools with facilities needs, the money available for new buildings through the community learning center projects has run out, bringing this chapter in APS history to a close.

Foulk said she was grateful the district had the opportunity to renovate and reconstruct so many buildings to meet the needs of modern-day students.

“It’s been such a joy to go through it and see what we can put together for the kids,” Foulk said.

Garfield cost $57 million and was bid out completely before construction prices began to skyrocket, keeping expenditures within the budget.

“We were very fortunate with the time we started this project,” Foulk said.

Garfield will serve as both community center and high school, serving about 900 students initially but with room for up to 1,400.

The opening of Garfield is, for the most part, the end of a contentious merging of the high schools in the Kenmore and Firestone Park neighborhoods in 2017.

The merger and the subsequent planning for where a new school would be built and what it would be called caused deep pain for both communities, but ultimately Garfield was built on its former site on the east end of the south side of Akron.

The Kenmore community is still grieving the loss of its high school, with the school board and administration in talks about what to do with the building next but no decision made as of yet.

The new school, however, is ready to meet the needs of students no matter which side of town they come from.

The three-story, 260,000-square-foot building features a 750-seat auditorium, a massive cafeteria with projector screens, two gymnasiums and a learning resource center that serves as a library as well as an innovation lab with technology and space for hands-on creative activities.

Garfield was also the first school to be completely designed and constructed after Akron shifted its high schools to the College and Career Academies model, which breaks up the school into smaller communities focused on career paths, and provides hands-on learning opportunities and certifications in those fields.

That means the school was designed with the technical and classroom needs of those programs in mind. As such, the culinary program now has a full industrial kitchen, and the advanced manufacturing program has a machine shop filled with a dozen workstations. Information technology students have their own computer lab, outfitted to meet their advanced programming needs. The nursing pathway has a lab space with hospital beds and mannequins.

Still, the building has throwbacks to its history and to a less technological time. Each classroom has a hand-operated pencil sharpener mounted on the wall. Terra cotta wall statues from the old Garfield building were saved and built into the brick walls of the new Garfield — including one that wasn’t planned.

Foulk said a terra cotta wall hanging of a man reading a book was not slated to be saved during demolition, but it fell off the wall and didn’t break.

“We decided it was telling us something,” Foulk said, so they found a spot for him in the new library.

Aside from the amenities, Cooper, the art teacher, said it was nice just to see daylight from her classroom. Her old space in the former building didn’t have windows. Now, every classroom has a window.

“It’s absolutely beautiful,” Cooper said.

Contact education reporter Jennifer Pignolet at jpignolet@thebeaconjournal.com, at 330-996-3216 or on Twitter @JenPignolet.