Green Woods Charter School officially opens for education in Roxborough [gallery]

On Monday morning, a ceremonial ribbon-cutting event marked the grand opening of the Green Woods Charter School, a three-story, $13.5 million, 60,000-square-foot building on the 400 block of Domino Lane in Roxborough.

This morning, the school’s initial class of 465 students will pass through the doors of the new steel, stone and glass building for the first time.

The projected opening date when work began in the fall of 2012 had been Sept. 2013.

However, Roxborough’s geology — lots of rocks and ledges — slowed construction, and the opening was pushed back to January.

For nearly three decades, the site had been Keenan’s Valley View Inn, a popular restaurant that closed in June 2012.

It then became a dumping ground, and was designated a brownfield site with high levels of lead and arsenic that dated back to the region’s industrial past. Remediation of those contaminants was part of the construction process.