New auditorium nearing completion
October 30, 2009
Filed under News, Top Stories
The LHS auditorium, which began construction last year, will possibly be finished sometime in the spring, according to Principal Mark Smith.
“The construction in the auditorium is going well, and we’re not behind schedule,” Smith said. “We’re on pace to finish in the spring, but there’s no specific move-in date. As most construction people are, they’re not going to say, ‘Well, you’re going to able to use the auditorium by the third week of February,’ but I do feel like we will use the auditorium before the school year is out.”
Smith said construction has moved to the inside of the auditorium, so bad weather will not slow down progress.
“Also, if you were to go into the auditorium right now, they have two ceilings; one is suspended so they can work at the original ceiling,” he said. “It’s going to be an awesome auditorium with 850 seats, four classrooms and restrooms.”
Smith said the LHS auditorium will be smaller than that of the Lufkin Middle School.
“Theirs holds about 1,200 seats, and if people want to rent an auditorium, they’ll still rent that larger building; it’s a very nice auditorium,” he said. “It was renovated, which means that they used the same building but moved seats out, fixed the ceiling, and did things like that. But ours is brand-new, so ours is going to be nicer.”
However, the auditorium will not be available for all activities.
“One thing that our auditorium will not be able to be used for, because people have asked, ‘Are we going to be able to do graduation and those kind of things’ — not big enough,” Smith said. “So we’ll still have graduations in the football stadium, but it will allow us to have class meetings; there’s nothing worse than having to sit on those round stools in the cafeteria. This way, if I need to meet with sophomores, juniors, seniors, freshmen, we can all go in there by grade.”
The auditorium will be named the Tom Jack Lucas Auditorium after a former LHS theater arts teacher.
“Our Tri-Ethnic Committee took on the challenge of narrowing down the names,” Superintendent Roy Knight said. “The gentleman that we named the auditorium after actually started teaching here in the ’50s, taught at Lufkin High School for over 20 years, and was an icon. When we had a television studio, he pioneered that here and did a lot of things for us that were kind of cutting-edge at the time. He was a longtime patron of the arts, a great guy, and he taught many of the people who are my board members now.”
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