By Tracy Ouellette
SLN Staff
The East Troy Community School District Board of Education tabled the decision Monday on whether to add the six additional welding stations to the high school shop area until February.
At the last School Board meeting, the board approved spending the money to upgrade the shop/welding area to accommodate an additional six welding stations, but stopped short of approving the actual stations.
At issue was the air-handling system, which will cost the district another $75,000, and the price of the welders, which will be about another $25,000.
Buildings and Grounds Manager Bob Ellis updated the board on the pros and cons of the two air-handling systems being considered – a fresh-air system and a filtered system.
Ellis told the board his recommendation for the system would be the fresh-air system because he believed it met OSHA’s more restrictive code, which Ellis said was what he understood the standard the district needed to meet.
Representatives from Fredericksen Engineering Inc., the HVAC contractor working on the high school referendum project, also said they advise using the fresh-air system and that their engineer wouldn’t sign off on a filtered-air system.
Dan Bohrer, from Hastings Air Energy Control, spoke to the board about the filtered-air system the company was proposing for the workshop area and how it was a “greener” option since it didn’t exhaust the iron oxide and chemicals from the welding lab out into the environment, but instead cleaned the air to recirculate back into the shop.
School Board President Ted Zess asked which system was safest for the kids and staff and Bohrer said he believed their system was the safest and had been used in hundreds of welding labs and schools.
Because of the additional costs and the high school budget getting tight as the end of the project neared, the board decided to table the decision adding the welding stations until the semester break in the school year.
Part of the reason for the decision to wait was to see if the set up of six welding stations along with the plasma cutter and CNC machine in the show area would be adequate to teach the two metals classes next year. Those classes have 14 and 17 students in them.
East Troy High School Principal Stacey Kuehn said after conversations with the metals teacher, he told her that while not “ideal” six stations would be “sufficient” given the current funds for the project.
School Board member Martha Bresler said she found it hard to believe the shop teacher said he didn’t need the extra stations anymore after what they had heard previously.
“Seventeen kids on six welding stations doesn’t seem adequate to me, much less idea,” Bresler said.
School District Administrator Chris Hibner said the metals teacher didn’t say he didn’t want the extra stations, but that he was being “a team player” and trying to work within the budget.
Hibner also offered the board a solution to finding the additional $75,000 needed to add the stations in the referendum budget should they need to come February. He reminded the board it had already set aside that much to possibly purchase new chairs for the lecture hall, something they hadn’t completely decided on doing yet. Hibner said that money could be used for the additional welding stations if it came down to the wire with costs. He said he wasn’t pitting one against the other, but offering the board a way to pay for the stations if they found they were needed to teach the classes.
“How bad do you want it?” Hibner asked the board. “If you want it that bad, here you go.”
