By Tracy Ouellette
SLN Staff
The East Troy School Board voted Monday night to increase the number of welding stations in the high school’s new tech area from six to 10.
The decision came about after staff presented the board with the issues with only having six stations in the school. High School Principal Rick Penniston and Assistant Principal Stacey Kuehn told the board Gateway Technical College said they would need 10 to 14 welding stations in the tech ed area for Gateway to be able to teach its welding classes in the space, which is something East Troy is interested in doing in the future.
However, the original scope of that part of the high school referendum project only called for six welding station and two other flexible stations in the room. As such, the ventilation and power systems for the space, which have already been delivered, were built for the eight workstations.
To up the capacity in the area to accommodate a total of 12 stations is going to require a new ventilation system and a restructuring of the power lines. A representative from Miron Construction told the board the cost of upgrading the tech ed area at this late stage of the game was going to cost any where from $35,000 to $70,000 more. He said the district was probably going to have to absorb the cost of reordering the HVAC and power units because returning made-to-order items like that wasn’t an easy thing to do.
Tech ed teacher Jack Hart told the board many on his students in the welding classes, which have been increasing in size, spend most of their time watching other students weld because there wasn’t enough stations for class sizes.
Parent Tim Griffin confirmed this, saying his daughter had taken welding and had been extremely frustrated at the lack of time available for welding.
District Administrator Chris Hibner made it a point to tell the board they were facing this decision, which had to be made Monday to try to keep the construction on track, because of what’s happened since the room was originally designed, not because Bray Architects didn’t do their job. Bray designed the area for the six stations the original plans called for. Penniston said the discussions about increasing that began in January when Gateway made its wishes known.
Board member Martha Bresler said her main concern was to give the East Troy students what they needed, and if Gateway could use their facilities for night classes, fine, but the students in the district came first.
“So, what do the kids need,” Board President Ted Zess asked.
“According to the teacher, six stations is not enough,” Bresler said. “We need to set up for more.”
Zess asked the rep from Miron if the space could “comfortably” accommodate 10 welding stations and was told Bray would be able to work that out for them.
Zess made a motion to increase the number of welding stations to 10 “at the lowest possible cost.”
Building and Grounds Director Bob Ellis said the board should consider purchasing new welding units for the space because the older, donated units they had would require a more expensive power system and it might be cheaper to buy new welders to save on the infrastructure cost of the power.
Zess said if Ellis could cost it out and it would save the district money, they could buy new welding unit.
The board voted unanimously on the motion.
