Principal Carla Smith is building a new team to reopen Probstfield Elementary School next week. With her is first-year kindergarten teacher Audrey Miller. (Photo/Nancy Hanson)/

The 59-year-old Probstfield School will experience something special Monday that no other shuttered Moorhead elementary facility has ever seen: Hundreds of youngsters will be pouring back through its doors.

From the 1960s through 2004, Probstfield welcomed as many as 600 youngsters in kindergarten and grades one through six. Its classrooms emptied after the completion of the larger, brand-new S.G. Reinertson Elementary a mile or so to the south in 2004.

Since then, the population of the school at 14th Street and 24th Avenue South has ebbed and flowed. Occupied by district administrative offices and early childhood programs in the interim, it saw a new generation of kindergartners in 2012 as Reinertson’s enrollment outgrew its quarters. Eventually the Kindergarten Center here accommodated the littlest class from all over the city … until construction of the bond issue in 2015 that funded Dorothy Dodds Elementary and Horizons West, with its fifth- and sixth-grade classes.

Now Carla Smith is presiding over Probstfield’s resurrection as a full K-4 elementary school, She has spent the summer overseeing construction crews that have opened up some once-subdivided classrooms and made other tweaks to the nearly 60-year-old structure as it awaits its first full spectrum of students in almost two decades.

“Not everything in here had changed over the years,” says Smith, who – after opening Horizon West in 2017 and overseeing creation of the online Spud Academy in 2020 and 2021 – has become something of a district specialist in prepping new schools. “A couple classrooms still have the original cabinets from 1965. Some new spaces were added on the south side for the Kindergarten Center. Some areas were divided into smaller sections – “we’ve taken the walls down,” she notes. “New carpet, new tile, fresh paint on the walls – a lot has been accomplished here since the school year ended last June.”

Until last spring, Smith had been working on an altogether different project, “We were planning to open a Spanish immersion program in 2020. Then the pandemic struck,” she explains. Covid changed those plans; instead, she put together the Spud Academy (last year renamed the Moorhead Online Academy). She was back to preparing the immersion plan when mushrooming enrollments forced the school board to change direction. Spanish immersion would remain at Ellen Hopkins School, and Probstfield would reopen for the general population of young learners.

Now 14 sections of classes have been readied to welcome a newly minted student body drawn from all over the city. Starting Monday, nearly 300 children, from kindergarten to fourth grade, will file in — three classrooms each of kindergarten through third graders and two of fourth graders. In addition, about 300 more of the very youngest will continue to participate in Jump Start and Early Intervention Services, both programs consolidated in the north wing of the building while the elementary programs occupy the south.

Of the K-4 enrollment, Smith says, “I think this is just the beginning. With the growth Moorhead is experiencing, our numbers are bound to go up.”

Unlike many other young Spuds, these boys and girls will all be bused, and from all over the city. The Probstfield population has been drawn by all four pre-existing elementary schools. Unlike the other facilities, this school doesn’t pull in kids from its own neighborhood. In fact, Probstfield’s neighbors attend Ellen Hopkins, just a couple blocks away.

That means all the faces will be new when school begins next week. In recent weeks, Smith has been meeting with her school’s newly assembled faculty of 14 general education teachers plus specialists and special-education professionals, a total of 23 or 24.

“Many of our teachers were already in the system, though some are new to us,” she says. Some were reassigned from other schools, leaving behind the fellowship of teachers, staff and students they’ve come to know well. Not all were originally eager to move.“That’s normal. You’re grieving,” the principal, who has been in the system 18 years, readily acknowledges. “But since then, some have told me, ‘At first I was sad. Then I thought about it … how exciting it is to be part of something new. Now this is where I want to be.’” Smith pauses, and adds, “It’s beautiful.”

She expects minimum challenges for the students themselves, though they may have attended other schools in the past. “Kids are so resilient. They’re positive and open. Sometimes,” she adds,”it’s a lot harder for adults to manage change.”

She says she and her crew are ready and waiting to help the new students and their families come together as a cohesive community. “We understand. We want every one of our families to know we’re here to serve them and their kids.

“This is their school. It’s our community. They will always be welcome here.”