No school board meeting tonight, so I thought I should post an update on the new elementary school project. A contract was executed with Environmental Holdings Group to remove all asbestos that may be in the buildings at the old Odell site. That work started on July 1 and should be completed by August 5. We had to wait until now to start that work because a local youth lacrosse league had a contract with the school district to use the fields at old Odell through the end of June. The school district has solicited bids for demolition of all of the buildings on the old Odell site, and those bids will be opened on July 10th. I assume we will be voting on issuing a contract to the low bidder at our meeting on July 14, which means they could start knocking down buildings in August. I was hoping that by now we would have some drawings showing the design for the new school which could be posted on the district website, but that has not happened yet. I can tell you that the design will have a floor plan that is shaped like the letter E with the three fingers of the E being three wings of classrooms - one for each grade level (3rd, 4th, 5th). All of the core facilities will be located long the spine of E. After the main entrance, which will have a small room for the school resource officer, there will be the main office, the media center, art, music and computer rooms, the gym and the cafeteria. The three classroom wings can be closed off from the core hallway, so we could have events in the core facilities in the evenings and not have people wandering into classrooms. The classroom wings will also have separate climate control systems. The design will have a number of energy efficiency features including high, north-facing windows along the classroom hallways which will allow non-direct (and therefore not overly hot) sunlight to illuminate the hallways. There will be light tubes (sometimes called light pipes) which will bring sunlight from the roof into each classroom. Im sure there are other features, but those are two that stick in my mind from the design review we had with the architects at the end of May. I am hoping we can share more design details soon.
Posted on: Mon, 07 Jul 2014 23:11:19 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015