The new math and science building at Paris Junior College is on schedule for completion before the end of the year.
“We’ll start moving people in at the end of the semester,” PJC President Dr. Pamela Anglin told members of the administration and board of regents during a tour Thursday. “And then in January, we’ll be teaching.” 
The tour included regents Roma Street, Louise Taylor, Carlton Grant and Gina Walker-Bowman, as well as Business Services Vice President John Eastman and Academic Studies Vice President Dwight Chaney.
“This looks so much like the sketches,” Taylor said. “It’s so much fun after seeing the drawings.”
Work started in August 2011. When finished around the end of November, it will be 309 feet long and 85 feet wide with 42,000 square feet.
“It’s much bigger than I thought it was,” Grant said.
The facade will feature a great deal of glass and brick to match surrounding buildings.
“It makes us look cosmopolitan,” Bowman said.
The building has two lecture halls with room for 60 students each – or should the need arise, a dividing wall can be moved for room for 120 people. All classrooms will have projectors and screens and “the most current technology,” Anglin said. Students will likely appreciate the planned wi-fi access throughout.
“I got out my yearbooks from 1947-48,” Street said. “The old gym and administration were the only ‘buildings.’ Everything else was wooden.”
She’s not the only one to compare the modern campus with days gone by.
“I have elderly people I’ve never met before come up to me at Kroger, men in their 70s and 80s, coming up and telling me, ‘That new building is wonderful,’” Anglin said. “It’s something the whole community is proud of.”
The work includes a wider driveway and expanded parking lot. Which might have resulted in the loss of Pyro, but the project was revised to allow the dragon to remain out beside Clarksville Street.
PJC has made a concerted effort to make the new building mesh with the rest of the campus.
“We kept all the big trees,” Anglin said. “This building has been set in.”
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