It's summer time at McCord Middle School, and Principal Michael Kuri is doing what principals do in the summer time: scheduling and preparing for students to come back for the new school year, which starts Aug. 24.

Kuri's student load has increased somewhat, though; he'll welcome about 150 to 160 students from Perry Middle School, swelling his enrollment to about 495 seventh- and eighth-graders.

That number is projected to grow to about 590 by 2015, according to enrollment projections. Building capacity is listed at 700 students.

Changes are being made this summer to accommodate those students, Kuri said.

The Worthington school board approved the renovation of a family and consumer science classroom at McCord, splitting it into two classrooms, at the June 28 school board meeting. The cost is about $50,000.

"We've also changed around a couple of other classroom spaces," Kuri said. "Our computer lab has been converted into a classroom, replacing the desktop computers with 30 full-size laptops on a cart, so we can take the technology to the kids."

Another classroom was converted from a special-education unit, giving the building four additional classrooms, he said.

As far as locker space goes, new lockers had been scheduled to be installed before the merger of Perry and McCord, Kuri said.

"We were putting in better and new lockers anyway; we're just putting in more of them," he said.

Perry and McCord parents packed several school board meetings after the district announced the merger in February, protesting everything from too-early lunch hours to crowded halls and abbreviated health education, claiming the district was not answering their questions in a timely way.

The merger is expected to save the district about $865,000 next year and about $1 million each succeeding year, according to district Treasurer Jeff McCuen.

With Worthington's middle school cost per pupil soaring every year -- growing much faster than the elementary schools' or high schools' cost per pupil -- a change in the middle school structure was necessary, said Superintendent Melissa Conrath.

She called the change "difficult" because it eliminated team teaching and brought up many parent concerns, but "the overall plan will help trim the budget without negatively impacting education," Conrath wrote in a letter to parents.

Kuri said all the middle schools, not just McCord, have undergone some of the same changes in restructuring the middle school schedule.

"We are all running a different schedule this year, (Principals) Santha (Stall) at Worthingway and Pamela VanHorn at Kilbourne," Kuri said. "Our offerings to students will be similar, but how we offer those courses will differ from building to building."

The lunch periods haven't changed a great deal, but there will be more separate periods, he said.

"Typically we had fourth and fifth period for lunch in two 23-minute periods," he said. "In adding more students to our lunch periods, we'll begin the first lunch period only about 20 minutes earlier than our previous lunch period, at 10:50 a.m. and there will be more lunch periods, at about 20 minutes long."

Kuri said the total number of students in a lunch period typically was up to 100 last school year and now will average about 90 students per lunch period.

"We added a cafeteria worker so that we could run two full-lunch hot-plate lines," he said.

Kuri has been principal in the district for 10 years.

"Any time you look at change, it's usually that you have to do more with less," he said. "No one is coming up to us to say, 'Here is $10 million more for Worthington kids.' The challenge is to provide the high-quality opportunities our parents have come to expect, and we are very cognizant of that."

The Phoenix Middle School program -- an alternative program with expanded student choices and longer school hours -- will continue to operate from the Perry building.

Enrollment at Kilbourne and Worthingway middle schools is expected to stay about the same, at 335 and 360 students, respectively.