New Rogers High School plans for four-story building block

NEWPORT — The current Rogers High School is a series of multiple one-story buildings and pods, some of them connected by long corridors, sprawled across the site on Wickham Road and Old Fort Road.

Architect Mark Rhoades with SLAM Collaborative Inc., which is tasked with designing a new high school for the site, told community members Thursday evening they want to compress the high school by going vertical. 

The proposed school would have 217,700 square feet, which would be a reduction from the current 238,450-square-foot high school. The current high school has “too many doors and too many corridors,” Rhoades said.

The new high school plan unveiled this week shows a four-story building block parallel to Wickham Road that will house the academic classrooms and have two elevators besides the stairwells. The connected two-story building section will feature a new gymnasium, cafeteria, media room, Block Box Theater and some of the career and technical spaces.

The latest design for the new Rogers High School will be four stories.

The theater could be divided with a movable soundproof wall, thus converting it into two separate rooms. The band could be playing in one room, the chorus practicing in the other room, and they won’t hear each other, Rhoades said.

The cafeteria and media center would be adjacent to an open courtyard at the interior of the two-story building, thus providing more natural light, he said.