Inside Brookings High School, it's not hard to see what construction crews have been up to this summer: A new grand entrance, kitchen, lunchroom, offices for administrators and guidance counselors, green room/makeup room, set-building room, a completely renovated auditorium and much more.
While it's certainly beautiful, this Phase III renovation work is not typical of summer projects in Brookings schools. The updated bathrooms in the high school's main hallway and new, brighter lights in the senior hall those are more along the lines of your average summer projects.
"It depends on what's needed," said Brian Lueders, Brookings School District business manager, during a tour of the school buildings Tuesday. "Usually there's concrete and sidewalk stuff that gets repaired. Sometimes the parking lot. We try to do lighting.
"Then, there's different stuff that principals and teachers have asked for over the year that's put on a five-year capital outlay plan," he added. "That might be a project we do over the summer ."
Any sizeable project should show up on the five-year plan. Smaller projects can be completed with the district's contingency fund, which gets about $100,000 per year. Improvements that the district's insurance company advises such as adding sprinklers to the Hillcrest Elementary library usually come out of the contingency fund. Some things are addressed at every school building every summer : Patching cracks and repainting lines in the parking lot, replacing crumbled concrete in the sidewalks, painting walls, deep-scrubbing and waxing tile floors, and more.
Replacing carpet used to be on that list, with each building getting about $25,000 in new carpet per summer. But this year, only Mickelson Middle School got carpet about $80,000 worth.
"We used to do so much per building, but then the dye lots didn't match up," Leuders said, explaining that carpet in the hallway could end up being a different shade than carpet in a neighboring classroom. "This year, we switched to doing one building and tried to get it all done."
Carpet was replaced in Mickelson's office area, seventhgrade pod, eighth-grade locker rooms and health rooms.
Next year, the project will be completed with carpet in the sixth-grade pod, library and another health room. Medary Elementary is next on the list for new carpet.
This summer, Medary is completing installation of energy-efficient lights and "univents" in all its classrooms. That means Medary's heating and air-conditioning is all controlled by computer now, as it is in the district's other schools.
This will save money when staff set the building to run warmer this fall when they leave for the afternoon. The project was done with $456,000 in no-interest loans to be repaid over 10 years.
Medary also got a wall down the middle of its computer room, to create a Social Skills classroom, and changed one wall in its library.
Hillcrest Elementary's major summer project was new boys and girls bathrooms in the main hallway, which cost about $115,000. They replace outdated bathrooms that were not handicap accessible. A set of similar bathrooms (the boys includes one toilet stall, two open toilets and multiple urinals) is on the fiveyear capital outlay plan to be replaced in the next several years. Hillcrest also got a set of new steps this summer to replace ones where a block was starting to crack.
At Camelot Intermediate School, the district's newest building, the only summer construction was a new patch of concrete to connect a storage shed to the street, Leuders said.
Small updates were also made to the newly named Career and Technical Education Center, which was the East Central Multi District building. Its exterior has a fresh coat of beige paint and some new landscaping, while the interior has a new sprinkler system , windows and smaller updates. Leuders said this summer included more large-scale projects than is usual for the district.
"There were more bigger projects this year, like that bathroom, so there were less smaller projects ," he said.
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