File:Al-Rasheed Academy - fmr District School No. 5, Abbott Road Elementary School, Our Lady of the Sacred Heart Catholic School - Hamburg, New York - 20230223.jpg

English: Al-Rasheed Academy, 3122 Abbott Road, Hamburg, New York, February 2023. Completed in 1942, the architectural design of this two-story brick school building is a fine example of the latter stages of the transition from the mutant Classicism of Art Deco (most in evidence in the projecting central portion of the façade, where tall, narrow windows are recessed between a colonnade of pilaster strips crowned with stylized Corinthian capitals) into the austerity of Modernism (note the side wings, characterized by a flat roof, repetitive fenestration, and a preponderance of straight lines and right angles). Though located just over the municipal border in Hamburg, the building was constructed to serve the elementary students of West Seneca Joint School District No. 5, which encompassed not only the southwest corner of its namesake town but also neighboring sections of Hamburg, Orchard Park, and Lackawanna. Overcrowding at the original schoolhouse, which was located about half a mile further north along Abbott Road near what's today the corner of Edison Street, was noted as early as 1938, when coverage in the Buffalo Courier-Express mentioned that at least twenty students had to be rerouted to schools in neighboring districts, and the remainder were forced to attend on a split schedule, with half the student body beginning classes early and returning home after lunch and the other reporting to school in late morning but staying until early evening. That year, District 5 voters approved a $209,000 plan to use an expected grant from the federal Public Works Administration to acquire the 40-acre farmstead formerly belonging to James W. Lawless, for which the Buffalo architecture firm of Fronczak & Whitman had designed a modern school building. After a delay, the grant was approved in October 1940, and construction began the following year on a modified and scaled-down version of the design (the original architects' plans were scrapped in favor of a similar but smaller building designed by Roswell Pfohl) which contained eight classrooms, a cafeteria, a gymnasium and an assembly hall. After the 1946 consolidation of the town's rural schools into the West Seneca Central School District, the building continued in operation for several decades as Abbott Road Elementary School. In 1984, it was purchased by the neighboring Catholic church of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart and used by them until 2015 as an annex to the parochial school. In 2021, the building came into the hands of Al-Rasheed Academy, an Islamic school whose main campus is situated in the adjacent city of Lackawanna.