After more than a month of sharing space at Hattie Dyer Elementary School, students and teachers from Krum’s Early Education Center moved into their own facility Monday.

A slew of cardboard moving boxes crowed the hallways of the facility throughout the weekend as teachers moved into their new classrooms, but by Monday, they had all been cleared in preparation for welcoming 293 students to the new campus. Despite a rainy start Monday, officials said teachers and students were all smiles about starting school at the new site adjacent to FM1173.

“Everybody’s just on cloud nine to be here,” said Principal Tammy Morris. “It feels really good. We kind of feel like we have our own space now.”

The more than 65,000-square-foot facility houses Krum’s pre-kindergarten to first grade classes. The center also includes an after-school center and an employee child-care center where more than 20 children up to age 5 are enrolled. Its main corridor includes administration offices, a cafetorium, gymnasium, library and classrooms for speech, reading and gifted-and-talented studies.

Each grade level also has 11 classrooms on three separate wings. The employee child-care center shares a wing with pre-kindergarten students while special-education students share a wing with kindergarten. Reading specialists share a wing with the first grade.

Krum Superintendent Mike Davis said the district relieved pressure off its other schools by opening the center. Before this school year, students in pre-kindergarten through second grade attended school at Hattie Dyer, and students in third through fifth grades attended Dodd Intermediate School.

With the addition of the center, Davis said, there is a better teacher-to-student ratio, and other schools have room to grow without overcrowding.

He said the center also reduces  hallway traffic, which at times was confusing to Krum’s youngest students.

DRC/Al Key

Marilyn Reeves, director of the employee child-care center at the Krum Early Education Center, talks to some of the children in a class at the new school Monday.

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“We feel like it’s going to enhance their learning ability,” Davis said. “Consequently we feel like the students will get a lot better start here.”

Nancy Shipley said her first-grade students have been “bouncing off the walls in excitement” of starting classes at the new campus. To finally move in is exhilarating, she said.

“Everything is just perfect for the young child. We couldn’t be more proud or happy with it,” Shipley said.

Voters approved the $10 million facility in a 2006 bond election. Setbacks in the building schedule and inclement weather last spring kept the facility from opening by Aug. 26 — the first day of the current school year.

For more than a month, the center’s pre-kindergarten through first-grade students shared a campus with second- and third-graders at Hattie Dyer while child-care students were taken care of at Dodd Intermediate. At both sites, the Early Education Center operated as its own facility.

Moving into the new facility has been the icing on the cake in the start of a progressive school year, said employee child-care director Marilyn Reeves.

“We feel like the sky’s the limit now,” she said. “We already had the tools [for educating students], but our facility is making it so much better.”

BRITNEY TABOR can be reached at 940-566-6876. Her e-mail address is btabor@dentonrc.com.