High school expansion moves along

Construction on the high school expansion has made progress over the past few months.

Masons spent the week before Christmas working on the additions to the locker rooms. 

The concrete precast walls for the auxiliary gym and wrestling room were scheduled to come sometime this week.

The plans call for a storage area between the gym and wrestling room for PE equipment storage and a room to store four wrestling mats. 

“The intent of this area here is that it’s ready for school in August, so this is kind of where they’re pushing stuff,” said Wayne Larsen, operations manager. “As soon as we get concrete walls and steel, we can get it enclosed.”

Once they have everything enclosed and ready, it will take about eight weeks for the wood floor to be installed and then the bleachers.

They are preparing two pads for new chillers near the new gym and on the northeast end of the property. The two areas are connected.

“We have ice storage tanks so we make ice during the evening and night when it’s off peak and then we use that ice the next day to cool down the building,” he said.

Sands Drywall is building all of the walls in their shop for the two-story classroom area. However, they are waiting for Egger Steel to bring in the support columns for that area of the project.

“They don’t want to set anymore up until they’ve got a way to stabilize everything. We’re having a lot of trouble getting steel materials,” Larsen said.

For the performing arts center, they have the platform up on the south end of that portion of the building. All of the precast walls are up, the braces are out and the decking is up. The roofers have been working it and will put a 4-inch layer of styrofoam and then rubber roofing on top of that so then that will be sealed up in the next couple weeks. 

They had to take an extra 3 feet of dirt and refill it with sand to slope down to the stage to put in tiered seating.

The music wing classroom walls are up and will have rooms for a black box theatre, vocal room with practice rooms, band room with practice rooms and a place for instrument storage.

“A year from now we’re hoping to be able to get into the classrooms and the office area. The PAC we’re hoping to be able to use for spring concerts in 2025,” he said.

There’s room between the high school expansion and greenhouse to get a house out of the CTE building. There will also be open space and some parking. 

“We’re hoping to take the buses away from the front of the building and have them come back here and drop high school kids and then go to the bus barn,” he said.