Ed Kemmick/Last Best News
Broadwater Elementary Principal Joe Halligan leads a tour through the “bull pen” outside the school Friday morning.
At a meeting Friday morning to talk about how to get students and teachers into and out of Broadwater Elementary School starting next week, Principal Joe Halligan cut to the chase.
“The first couple days — it’s going to be crazy,” he said.
Halligan met Friday with School District 2 officials, a few teachers and two representatives of Hardy Construction, which is overseeing a major renovation and expansion of the 105-year-old school, paid for out of a $122 million bond approved by voters last year.
They reviewed plans for getting people into a school nearly surrounded by torn-up streets and closed-off sidewalks, flanked by a giant hole in the ground and ringed — on this rainy Friday, at least — by a shallow sea of mud.
Barely half a mile away, where 108-year-old McKinley Elementary School is undergoing a similarly large renovation and expansion, the logistics will be daunting but not nearly as difficult as at Broadwater.
The problem there is that the school sits on Broadwater Avenue, a busy street where parents and buses can’t drop off children. To the east, Fourth Street West is closed for construction of a three-story annex. To the north, part of Wyoming Avenue is also closed for construction, and pieces of construction equipment enter school grounds from Wyoming.
Ed Kemmick/Last Best News
A three-story annex is under construction at Broadwater Elementary School.
That means most of the access to the school will be from a gravel alley that runs along the west side of the school and then turns right to connect with Fifth Street West. There are only eight or nine parking spots for teachers and staff off that alley.
So the plan is to bring all of Broadwater’s students in kindergarten through fifth grade out a north-facing door through a “bull run,” a corridor of temporary fencing faced with blue tarp, into a fenced-off area near the alley.
Standing in the middle of that area, Halligan said, “For you farmers and ranchers, for lack of a better word, this is the kid corral right here.”
Parents will be asked to park away from the school and walk to the corral to pick up their children. Fortunately, the Evangelical United Methodist Church, just across Fourth Street from the school, will allow the school full use of its parking lot during the day.
Teachers will be able to park there and parents will be able to use what spaces remain. But Larry Patterson, general supervisor for Hardy Construction, said there will be a few mitigating circumstances there as well.
When construction on the annex is at its peak, probably in January and February, he’ll have as many as 60 workers on site, and they will need to park at the church, too. And he said church officials pointed out that when there’s a funeral, there might be no parking at all.
Standing in the church parking lot, talking about all the variables and potential problems, Lew Anderson, SD2’s bond project manager, jokingly advised Halligan on what he could tell parents.
“Just keep reminding them — ‘it’s only one year and you’re going to love the result,’” he said.
Steve Ewen, Hardy’s project manager, went Anderson one better: “Tell them we’re having a baby; it’s just nine months.”
As the group toured the school grounds and the church parking lot, more and more concerns and possible solutions kept coming up. They talked about tripping hazards and the need for signs, yellow paint, orange cones and more fencing.
Ewen said he worried about the children’s inevitable fascination with cement trucks and other equipment, and how they could be kept out of the construction site. Brenda Koch, one of the district’s leadership support directors, suggested having staggered dismissal times, so all the students weren’t crowding the bull pen at the same time.
Ed Kemmick/Last Best News
New windows are being added to McKinley School, where the brickwork has already been restored.
The first day of the new school year is Wednesday. There was a lot of nodding of heads when Ewen said, “We may have to revisit this in a week or two.”
At least at Broadwater, students in all grades will be attending school there this year. At McKinley, where a classroom annex was demolished and the entire basement has been gutted, only K-2 students will be returning to classrooms next week.
Students in grades 3-5 will be attending school at nearby Lincoln Center, which is also the administrative headquarters for the district. Koch said even with construction around McKinley, traffic is so heavy around Lincoln that parents will be asked to deliver their children to McKinley, from where they will be bused to Lincoln, then pick them up at McKinley at the end of the day.
Fortunately, McKinley and Broadwater have fairly large numbers of students who walk and bike to school.
At McKinley, a new annex is being built on the site of the old one, so not much space was lost, and parents and teachers will still be able to park on three sides of the school and do pickups on the fourth side, on North 32nd Street.
Interior renovations at both schools — an overhaul of electrical and mechanical systems, new doors, windows and ceilings and much else — were to end Friday. Those projects will be continued next summer and are expected to be completed by the start of the school year in 2015, as are the building expansions and additions.
At McKinley, though, crews will stay busy in the basement, a rabbit’s warren of rooms and with what Anderson described as “18 different levels.”
“They’re going to continue work on this all winter,” he said. “They got the noisy stuff done.”
Parents have been kept informed of plans through meetings, newsletters, emails, public tours and letters. Koch said the district was considering using robo-calls to make one last information blitz this weekend.
