Lawrence school district officials are getting ready to put the former East Heights School back into service next year, if only on a temporary basis.

The school that was closed a decade ago will be used as the temporary school for students at Cordley School, which will have to be closed while it undergoes extensive remodeling and renovations.

That move is stirring up fond memories among former East Heights teachers who are still in the district, including Sharon Daniels, who now teaches at Pinckney.

“One thing I really liked was that all the classrooms are straight up and down the hall,” she said. “All the teachers could step outside their door and see everybody else. So there was a real family feel there.”

Daniels recalled that her classroom was on the east side of the building, facing the sunrise in the morning and the playground behind the school.

“There’s a beautiful tree in the playground with a bench around it. That’s where everybody gathered around the playground. In the fall, it was just gorgeous,” he said.

East Heights was smaller than most of the other elementary schools in the district, and it served a largely lower-income neighborhood.

But former East Heights teacher Adela Solis, who now teaches at Cordley, said that was also part of the school’s charm.

“One memory that really sticks out in my mind is that there’s a pretty sizable hill on the back of the playground that goes down Maple Street,” she said recently. “And I remember after snowstorms, that here are these children who don’t have a lot of what other children may have. But cardboard boxes – cutting off flaps of cardboard boxes and sliding down those hills, and just having so much fun. It was such a ubiquitous childhood thing.”

“It was just the pure and utter enjoyment of childhood,” Solis said. “It was freezing cold out there, and all of us adults were huddled, because we’re not sliding down those hills. But watching those children play, and just enjoying it, I can’t help but smile whenever I think about that.”

East Heights closed at the end of the 2002-2003 school year as part of a consolidation plan aimed at reducing district costs. Its attendance zone was absorbed into New York and Kennedy schools.

For several years afterwards, East Heights housed the district’s early childhood education program, but that was shifted to Kennedy in 2010. Since then it has been used by the Boys and Girls Club of Lawrence, which uses it to provide after-school programs for students at Kennedy and Prairie Park schools.

Assistant superintendent Kyle Hayden said getting East Heights back into condition to serve as a school will take some work.

“We’ll start cleaning it out and getting ready around April 1,” he said. “We’ll spend a couple months. There is kitchen equipment we need to get in. There’s also some painting and repair work that will need to get done.”

And because East Heights is smaller than Cordley, the district will also have to place two or three portable buildings on the site in order to have enough classroom space, Hayden said.

While East Heights is being used as a school again, the Boys and Girls Club programs will be shifted to Prairie Park.