|
|
|
|
Cole project questions answered |
|
Thursday, 07 May 2009 |
By ABBY FOX
Project Manager Jon Winikur and Cole Principal Mike Zajac are going to be in the lobby of Cole Junior High Thursday, 5 to 7 p.m., to explain what’s next for the Cole construction project.
Here’s a quick Q & A from Tuesday’s open house.
Q. What’s the first thing that’s happening in the construction of a new middle school and when is it happening?
A. After school lets out in June, the gym is going to be demolished, and the portable classrooms will be moved from the back of the school to the front, near the front office, so that classrooms 7, 8, 9, tech ed and special ed can move into them by the start of the school year.
Q. How much does it cost to demolish the gym and when will that happen?
A. Winikur won’t know the cost until Monday, when the bids come in. The time it will take to demolish the gym, remove the asbestos and do air-quality testing and make sure it’s safe for students to return in the fall, could take ten weeks, he said.
Q. What are the students going to do for the next two school years with no gym, while the new school is being built?
A. They’re going to turn the cafeteria into a makeshift gym and hold classes there. Sports that need a real gym, like Varsity basketball, will move to the high school gym, Zajac said. Intramural sports will be affected by the lack of a gym, but Varsity sports won’t be.
Students and teachers will make do with the cafeteria by coming up with new activities to spend their gym time, such as perhaps a walk-climbing wall, or a portable basketball hoop, Zajac said, and they’ll be taking the gym class outdoors whenever possible. “It’ll be a great opportunity to try new things, things we may incorporate into the new Cole gym,” he said.
Q. The project is going to take two full school years. Will there be a lot of construction noise that could have a long-term impact on student learning?
A. Winikur said that the project will have separation walls to ameliorate the noise. “There will be noise, but not crazy noise,” he said, and several hundred yards away at that.
Q. So if the gym classes are moving to the cafeteria and the cafeteria becomes a gym, where will the band students practice?
A. The band is moving from the cafeteria where they practice now to the woodworking room.
Q. Then what’s happening to woodworking?
A. Woodworking is in its last year at Cole, to make way for more technology classes such as website design, digital photography and more robotics. Woodworking is a fairly expensive program, Zajac said, costing some $4,000 a year, and Cole plans to transfer that money to fund more technology courses.
“I understand the benefits of woodworking, but we have to evolve,” Zajac said.
Q. What’s the deadline for the completion of the new school, followed by the old school being torn down, to make way for parking spaces and fields?
A. April 2011 is the goal, because the project should take a year and a half, or two school years, to complete.
Seventh and eighth-graders will move in first, Zajac said, as they’ll be already there in the old school, and once they’re moved in, the sixth-graders will come aboard, to take up their spot on the first floor. (The students are segregated by floor, each grade on their own floor, youngest to oldest.)
“We’ve put a lot of thought into this,” Zajac said.
|
|
|
|
