As a 26-year education veteran in Alabama, Gulf Shores Elementary Principal Amy Hiller knows portables.

“Usually when schools have portables you’re expecting something really small and kind of secondhand things,” Hiller said.

That’s not what she found when visiting Gulf Shores for the first time after expressing interest in becoming the new principal here.

She was surprised by what she saw.

“But these portables here, if you’ve got to be in a portable, I’d want to be in one of these,” she said. “They’ve been done very well. There’s a lot more room in these than I’ve seen other places. They added the porches and ramps and the teachers have really made them homey.

“They call them cabins in the back and cottages in the front and they put out flowers and all the little things out. So if you’ve got to be in a portable this is a good place to be.”

Gulf Coast Media spent time with Hiller going over what it takes to complete a day at a school that was initially built to house less than 500 students. With an added wing that number went up to 690, but the cafeteria and library weren’t expanded to serve the additional students.

With the 11 portables – more than any school in the Baldwin County School System – Gulf Shores Elementary welcomed 1,025 students in grades Pre-K through sixth grade for the 2016-17 school year. To feed them all, the first students arrive for lunch at 10:35 a.m., the last groups at 12:18 p.m.

“Is it the best thing?” Hiller asked about the portables. “No because students have to go in and out of the buildings all day long, travel a long way to get anywhere. I guess those are the biggest drawbacks.”

But Hiller and her staff don’t look for drawbacks. They look for positives in their daylong quest to educate students. And that means utilizing the space they have.

“We at Gulf Shores Elementary do a lot of project-based learning, a lot of hands-on things,” she said. “Kids are up and about in centers and stuff, teachers are all over the room. We’re not everybody sitting in their seats and the teacher’s in the front of the room all the time.”

The project-based theories were much in practice, a visit to several classrooms found at the start of a busy day Oct. 21 despite the lack of space.

A group of fourth graders had taken a math lesson to the hall studying math problems around a pile of M&Ms candy. The kids earned a candy piece as the lesson progressed.

Most of the floor space inside the classroom was taken so this group made the hallway an extension of their classroom. Hiller says it’s an example of how teachers adapt and overcome space inadequacies.

“They’re resourceful, they’re flexible, they are going to go with the flow,” she said. “We make it work.”

Lindsay Taylor’s kindergarten class was studying and reviewing parts of flowers.

Pre-K kids were picking and singing the morning song using an interactive Promethean whiteboard.

“See the sun shining in the window. It’s time to start a new day. Can’t you hear the songbirds singing? … It’s a beautiful day to share with you and you and you and you and you …”

Suzanne Brokenshaw’s kindergarten was reviewing days of the week by recognizing it was a Friday and reviewed what day was yesterday and what day would follow.

The playground out back was a mass of more than 100 moving, yelling and playing kids under the watchful eye of three P.E. teachers. The area is framed on one side by the middle school gym and a wing of classrooms for the middle school.

“We’re overcrowded and we have very limited space for kids to play here,” Hiller said. “Almost no green space.”

Hiller stepped out of the din of the playground into a tiny, quiet gym.

“This is it,” she said. “There’s no room for bleachers on either side, there’s no place in this school for the entire school to gather at one time. When we have assemblies we have to do them in two or three waves so we can do one after the other. Even the middle school gym is not big enough to hold us.”

Portables frame another side of the playground and inside students were engaged in a variety of lessons in the room of Amanda McAleer’s third grade where math and spelling lessons were under way.

Tonya Best’s class was having free-choice Friday where some students were writing in journals, others working on math and others learning on the Moby Mac computers.

Later in the morning, a class gathered in Librarian Michelle Bennett’s small, but fully utilized facility.

“With the county’s help,” Bennett said. “They’ve built more shelves three or four times. We’ve rearranged shelves and the county’s good about supporting libraries. At least I’m sure they fully support ours.”

Hiller’s said her former school in Winston County had 225 students and a bigger library.

Bennett was proud to make do with what she had, a prevailing theme among staffers at Gulf Shores Elementary. She particularly enjoys teaching the students researching skills on the Alabama Virtual Library, a system provided by the state.

Toward the end of the day, Melissa Ryall stood on the deck outside her door under a beautiful blue sky, wind rustled the trees and wind chimes contributed a cheery tune. Her third-graders were returning to her portable classroom after a sojourn inside to take a bathroom break.

“Absolutely it’s not the ideal situation,” Ryalls, who has been in a portable four years, said. “Safety is an issue. We’re very exposed here when weather conditions pop up. Another thing is it takes away from our instructional time. We have to plan in takes extra minutes to get where you are going. Getting the whole class to the bathroom and back in the morning, there’s nearly 15 minutes of your time. And we do that all day long.”

The weather was ideal on Oct. 21, but her thoughts turned to rainy days.

“If it were a perfect world and I could pick something I’d say we need a bathroom more than we needed cover or something like that,” she said. “Those really rainy days are few and far between, but we need a bathroom all the time. That would be my first wish.”