As it was stated in last week’s edition of the Norwood Young America Times, Central Public Schools has been fortunate to have voter support for a number of improvement projects to our buildings. The timing of the election was something of a concern for us, being held in the fall of 2009, when everyone knew what our national economy was doing at that time. Our voters showed how important they felt education is to our students by passing the referendum anyway at that time.
It also turns out that progressing through our construction projects during the time of the down economy has led to the district being able to undertake some additional projects utilizing the funds approved during that election. These projects are also some work that we feel would need to be done in the upcoming years and this timing fits extremely well with the second phase of our project, as most of the work being done is at the Middle/High School building.
The auditorium will get a total remake. New seating, additional lighting, and a state of the art sound and video projection system will be installed. As the sound engineers found out, the cloud ceilings actually deaden the sound in the space, so they will be removed from the ceiling, thus sound will be much better as the ceiling is dropped. This will also allow the beautiful arch that surrounds the front of the stage to once again be visible.
We began to replace roofs at this facility a couple of years ago. Many of the roofs are aging and some leak once in a while, especially when it’s wet outside (ha, ha). Replacing these roof structures will not only help protect the rest of the building, but will provide a measure of energy efficiency as well. Replacing the Middle School windows will help in our efforts to conserve energy additionally.
The office spaces in both the Middle School and High School will be remodeled as part of this project. Currently, neither office configuration allows sight lines to the entry doors. The reworked configurations will allow both offices to have a direct sight line to anyone entering the buildings. This will be a very much needed improvement to both ends of the building.
Finally, all the outside doors at the Elementary School will be replaced. We looked at this last summer when all the work was done to the building, decided to wait and include in this year’s bid process instead of a change order last summer, and this decision resulted in a nearly $70,000 savings on this part alone.
Again I feel very fortunate to work in a supportive district. Without the citizens’ support, none of these projects would be possible.