School board gets look at updated designs for district-wide improvements
By Kellen Olshefski
Editor
The Elkhorn Area Schools Board of Education received an update at the July 13 meeting, regarding school improvement projects funded by the referendum approved in April.
Bob Morris of Eppstein Uhen Architects said Monday night when it comes to the aesthetic design of what they’re doing, they focused first on the exterior designs of the additions to school facilities in the district.
“We’ve talked about, since we have the additions going on each school, how do we blend the additions with the existing buildings aesthetics,” he said. “What we’re doing is no more foreign to the building than what it needs to be.”
He said they’ve focused on keeping the new designs cost efficient, keeping the project on budget, which he said isn’t a hope, but a must.
Furthermore, with the additions of gymnasiums at West Side and Tibbets elementary schools, he said they’ve focused on finding ways to keep the additions from detracting from the main entrances of the school as new gymnasium designs tend to be taller, comparing to gymnasiums of the past that were used in part as a cafeteria rather than a true gym.
Using taller gymnasiums, according to Morris, said is more of a functionality concern, allowing them to be used for the most possible uses, and the cost of adding an additional 5-feet in height to the gymnasium is a small enough cost difference that it just makes sense to create more opportunities for these spaces.
At Jackson Elementary, with the addition of a first-grade classroom, special education suite and room for the districts ACE program, Morris said they’ve attempted to match the front of the building in color schemes, unifying the building with blonde and red brick.
At West Side, Morris said with the entrance being red brick and the rest of the building being a sort of cream brick, like Jackson, they’ve designed the additions with red brick to create terminuses at each end of the building. At Tibbets, they attempted to continue the red-brick look around the building through the new gymnasium, entrance and music facility.
The addition of art rooms at the high school calls for a higher ceiling, allowing for more storage space, according to Morris, and will have overhead glass garage doors connecting the two classrooms to a central common learning space, to be used for dirtier work, such as sculpting and pottery.
As for building materials, Morris said where they’re doing brick work, they’re attempting to match brick work at the schools. Additionally, Morris noted they also look to use concrete paneling, something Dan Davis of C.G. Schmidt, Inc., the engineering firm handling the projects, said is about 35 percent to 40 percent less expensive.
Project schedule
Dan Davis of C.G. Schmidt, Inc., the engineering firm handling the projects, said Monday they hope to begin work in the fall with preliminary site-work beginning at Tibbets and West Side elementary schools, hopefully sometime in September.
Davis said they look to do a lot of work on the additions first before coming back to work on interior remodeling. However, if they’re able to build swing space, something staff has already begun, he said they hope to begin interior remodeling at the high school as soon as Thanksgiving.
“We’re going to grab as much as we can so we’re not trying to do everything next summer,” he said, noting the project is still currently on schedule, with completion in the fall of 2017.
“We want to get done as fast as we can … If we can do it without really interrupting school, we’ll go faster.”
