LA GRANDE — Keri Myer could not believe what she saw when she stepped into the La Grande Middle School’s staff lounge a week ago.

Gone was a drab and cluttered room and in its place was a cheerful-looking space filled with comfortable furniture, bright wall messages, displays of treasures from the past and much more.

“I was stunned,” the LMS librarian said. “I think everyone was.”

Myer was speaking of what she saw the morning of Monday, March 6, after members of the LMS Parent Teacher Organization had spent much of the weekend renovating the lounge.

“The first thing I thought was that they outdid themselves. It was fantastic,” she said. “This has a wow factor.”

Social studies teacher Anne Marie Fritz, like Myer, was touched that the PTO cared so much about the school’s teachers and staff that they would go to such trouble to renovate their lounge.

“It is an incredible gift,” she said.

Sixth grade teacher Parker McKinley echoed the sentiment.

“It is very impressive, a wonderful place to walk into,” he said.

Shayla Rollins, co-president of the middle school’s PTO, helped lead the renovation project. She said the transformative work was badly needed.

“It looked like a classroom that had become a storage room,” she said. “It didn’t feel like a break room.”

Many of the items now displayed in the lounge provide a sense of nostalgia. Some are from the Annex gym next to the middle school, where middle school students have attended classes for decades.

Savannah Altenburg, a PTO member who helped lead the lounge renovation project, said she is delighted that items could be saved from the Annex gym because this will help preserve a portion of the school’s legacy.

Many of the items are older than the middle school’s current building, which was constructed in the 1970s, Myer said. They include a hot dog bun warmer, a small scale, a bucket, a grate and hangers for physical education class bags.

The lounge now also has racks of old physical education locker room baskets that teachers and staff are able to keep their possessions in.

These vestiges of the past mean more today since the Annex building will soon be torn down to make room for an academic and athletic center that will be known as The Wildcat Center. Construction of the facility is scheduled to start in June after classes for the school year have concluded.

Kelly Goodnight, a paraeducator at La Grande Middle School, said the renovated lounge has many features that create a sanctuary-like environment, which she says helps her be ready to take on the uncommon challenges of being an educator.

“It puts me in the right mindset,” she said.