Small details whisper Laurel Park Elementary’s past: a blue corrugated exterior wall in an interior stairway, huge steel A-frame supports inside a classroom.

The shiny, two-story windows, walls the color of cantaloupe and honeydew and the high-gloss gymnasium floor proudly shout: This is the new home of the Laurel Park Penguins! Throughout the school, visitors will find a buiilding with a past, but with colorful new touches.

Laurel Park Elementary School, former home of the Bespak manufacturing plant, opened its doors to year-round tracks one, two and three on Monday, July 7. The 111,356-square-foot school on Laura Duncan Road in Apex is one of three new Wake County elementary schools opening for the 2008-09 school year including Mills Park in Cary, and the only one constructed by renovating an existing industrial building.

Jerry Bradley, Wake County Public School System’s director of facilities, design and construction, said the project had some challenges: “The plumbing in the existing building did not match the plumbing locations for a school,” he said. “We had to cut into the slab to make room for new plumbing drains.”

Another change included adding a steel structure to support the second floor. Now, students can look out over the gym, auditorium, cafeteria and even the world outside as they walk to class. Bradley was pleased with the results. “Our architects did an excellent job,” he said.

The Laurel Park community seems to agree. In the media center, filled with natural light from the school’s dramatic two-story wall of windows, media coordinator Maureen Gsell and media assistant Lisa Woodard were going over the organization of the school’s new book collection.

“We really are creating a new school community,” Gsell said. “The teamwork has been amazing.”

Woodard nodded. “It’s like a barn-raising; everyone has helped everyone else.”

Fifth-grade teacher Katie McMahon, who had been preparing materials in the work room, said, “I think Ms. Turner was very purposeful in hiring people who would work well together.”

McMahon was one of the teachers joining Principal Gail Turner from Oak Grove Elementary. “I had never opened a new school,” Turner said. “I didn’t know what to expect; it’s been an adventure.”

Principals transferring to new schools can take up to 10 percent of teachers from their current school. Other teachers may come from other schools in Wake County or elsewhere.

Coming together to form the Laurel Park Penguins are students from eight schools: Adams, Baucom, Briarcliff, Davis Drive, Dillard Drive, Morrisville, Swift Creek and York.

Some parents have been unhappy with the redistricting, saying their current schools were closer to home. Although that wasn’t the case for Jennifer Andrew of Cary. She has a fifth-grader and kindergartner starting at Laurel Park. Her daughter, Sydney, had been attending Adams Elementary, across from Cary Towne Center Mall.

“I was very pleased — this is so much closer. Laurel Park is about a mile from my house,” Andrew said. “I love it — it’s extremely well run. And when I went to the PTA meetings, there is good volunteer support.”

On the third day of school, there was no noise or chaos to carry through Laurel Park’s impressive atrium. Turner welcomed students as they made their way to class down the brightly colored hallways.

D.H. Griffin Construction’s senior project manager, Tom Handy, strolled the halls, admiring the glistening new kitchen and industrial steel beams, watching students fill the classrooms, able to see both the old and new working together.