David Darling remembers riding in his dad's car as a youngster up Southwest 108th Street toward 12th Avenue Southwest and seeing the "big brick presence" of Mount View Elementary School at the top of the hill.

Today Darling is the principal and he opens the brand-new Mount View School for the first day of school this week. It was important to him that the new school have an architectural presence like its predecessor.

Today a high atrium, visible from 108th Street, rises above the central hall of the school to form the new building's crest. High on the brick wall inside, workers installed the masonry from the old building saying "Mount View School 1942," along with some saved terra cotta embellishments.

The new school is designed to accommodate 600 students, Darling said. One week prior to opening, 540 students were registered and more are expected before the start of school Sept. 7.

The students at Mount View School come from a wide assortment of cultures. The parents of many are recent immigrants. Darling estimated about 35 percent of the students speak a language other than English at home.

"We wanted to reflect all cultures here," Darling said. He talked with the architects about how to do that in the design of the new school. They suggested installing plazas because such gathering spaces are common to most cultures throughout the world. So there is a plaza at the front entrance to the school outside the east end of the atrium. There's another plaza at the west end of the atrium.

Classrooms are arranged in clusters that keep kids of about the same ages together. There's a cluster for pre-kindergarten and kindergarten, and another for first and second grades. Third and fourth graders are together in a cluster, and fifth and sixth grades are together too.

Each cluster has separate classrooms arranged around a common area that is more room than hallway. The central space will be for team teaching, performing, meetings and other uses.

"Our teachers collaborate a lot," Darling said.

Instead of blackboards and chalk, classrooms are equipped with white boards and markers that can be wiped clean.

Overhead projectors are part of the past. The teacher in each room has a computer that can be connected to a liquid crystal display projector that can shine an image from the Internet onto a screen.

Each classroom also is equipped with four student computers in addition to one for the teacher. The school also has a computer lab with 31 terminals.

There's also a television, DVD player, video cassette recorder and a phone in each classroom as well as a wall of cabinets.

Overhead lights are wired to motion detectors that turn off the lights when no people are in the room. Conversely the lights come on when someone walks in.

There's a new gymnasium and adjoining multipurpose room. School cooks used to have to serve lunch in the old gym, which meant no athletics in the gym for hours each day. Now students will be able to use the gym all day while lunch will be served in the multipurpose room.

Like many other schools these days, the multipurpose room is the lunchroom as well as a gathering space for assemblies. There's an elevated stage at the east end of the room.

Besides a commercial kitchen, the multipurpose room also has a stove, sink and counter along the opposing wall for use during PTA meetings and other after-school events.

A moveable wall between the gym and multipurpose room can be opened to join the rooms if needed.

Increasingly common in schools with significant populations of immigrant students is a community room. Smaller than a classroom, it's a place where parents can come for meetings with teachers and counselors or to just hang out, Darling said. There's a small separate office plus two small rooms with telephones where parents can sit with a translator to communicate with school staff regarding their childrens' academic progress.

The community room also is equipped with a sink and cupboards.

Salmon Creek Elementary School was closed so school boundaries in the Highline School District had to be redrawn. Mount View School is expecting to take in about 190 new students who used to attend Salmon Creek Elementary. The redrawn boundaries resulted in about 100 Mount View students being transferred to other area schools.

Tim St. Clair can be reached at 932-0300 or tstclair@robinsonnews.com