Bulletin E-Edition:
Bend-La Pine Schools making big upgrades
By Sheila G. Miller / The Bulletin
Published: June 26. 2009 4:00AM PST
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School’s out for summer, but school construction is just getting going.
Bend-La Pine Schools will spend about $25 million on new and existing facilities over the next three months, including several projects that will have students doing double-takes when they return to school in the fall.
The funding comes from the $119 million bond passed by voters in 2006, and can only be used for building and capital projects. And according to Paul Eggleston, the director of facilities, many of this summer’s projects are coming in under budget.
“We’re under or right on the estimates we made in 2005,” he said. “Now we’re finding all the projects coming in at 10 to 15 percent under.”
One particularly busy area for school construction this summer is in La Pine, where a new elementary school is going up, the high school is being partially gutted and expanded, and the middle school is also receiving some long-needed work.
Most notable, however, is the new elementary school, which will be located on Burgess Road at the north end of town. It won’t open until fall 2010, but already the walls are up and crews are preparing the roof.
“With this construction climate, contractors do not want to mess around. They want to get on the job and get onto the next. They’ve got bills to pay,” Eggle-ston said. “So we’ll be working on it through the winter and then doing landscaping in the spring.”
The school’s construction ran into a hiccup earlier this year when the district was forced to spend more than $1 million to extend sewer and water lines to the site and was slowed in its attempts to purchase the land.
“It’s taken awhile to get the arrangement made with (the water and sewer districts),” Eggleston said. “But I think we’re through all that now. We’ve still got some major water line to run off-site, but the sewer line has been run. All of that is behind us. It just took longer and cost more.”
District spokeswoman Julianne Repman said by delaying the school’s opening until 2010, every aspect of the school, including the fields and playground, will be completely finished when students show up.
Once it opens in 2010, though, the school will have major implications for education in La Pine. Currently, fifth-graders attend La Pine Middle School because of crowding at the elementary.
“It will be an immediate pressure release,” Repman said, with fifth-graders returning to the elementary level and opening up space in the middle school.
Farther south, La Pine High School is undergoing some major renovations as well. Construction crews will add five classrooms, and will remodel the commons and library entrance. The high school previously featured a large, open commons with rows of lockers running through the area; those are gone now.
The commons area will be opened up and look similar to gathering areas in the district’s other high schools, and rows of lockers will now run along the walls.
While the inside work will be completed in time for school starting in September, the additional classrooms will likely be completed at the end of October.
And La Pine Middle School’s boiler system and heating, ventilation and air conditioning system will also be replaced and upgraded. It’s one of several schools getting tweaks and upgrades to their HVAC systems.
“All of them are 30 or 40, or in some cases 50 years old, and we’ve started a pretty intense standardization process where we want to reduce the numbers of different systems we have,” Eggleston said. “It makes it easier and thusly cheaper to deal with.”
In Bend, some older buildings are also getting spruce-ups this summer.
Pilot Butte Middle School, which was built in the 1960s, is getting a major face-lift.
Construction crews will add a new wing with five classrooms at the west end of the building, which Eggleston hopes will be ready for occupancy by the time school starts. The new classrooms will replace modular classrooms that have long sat on the campus. They were most recently used by Rimrock Expeditionary Alternative Learning Middle School (REALMS). REALMS will take over several classrooms in the middle school until it can find an off-campus location for its school.
But the most significant part of the middle school’s construction has nothing to do with increasing capacity. The hilly campus was built in the years before the Americans with Disabilities Act, a law requiring all public buildings, streets, sidewalks and other areas built or modified after 1992 to conform to specific accessibility standards.
“In order to get our building permit, we had to make the campus ADA accessible,” Eggleston said.
Since the school is built on the side of Pilot Butte, that’s no easy feat. Construction crews are regrading nearly every sidewalk and pathway on the campus, adding stairways, ramps and handrails. The school’s landscaping has been changed, and crews have rerouted the bus drive so that it will go around the field at the top of the campus, instead of sending buses through the playing fields.
“That’s been an expensive piece of the project,” Eggleston said. “The campus will look different and feel different, but that’s a good thing actually.”
Another old building in need of some major work is Bear Creek Elementary, built in the late 1960s on the southeast side of Bend. The school’s main entry has been moved, and the office, previously a cramped space, will now be rebuilt to look more like the office areas in the district’s newer elementary schools, with more open space and places for counseling, sick kids and several offices for administrators.
The school will also now feature a fire sprinkler system, an upgraded heating system and some new roofing.
But the most noticeable differences will be aesthetic.
The hallway floors will be replaced, new lights and lighting fixtures will be installed, and the entire building will be painted and cleaned.
“That school’s going to take on a different look,” Eggleston said. “It will make it look a lot brighter and cleaner.”
And although it will require construction crews to work six days a week in double shifts, Eggleston said the school will be completely remodeled by September, when school starts.
The last large project, Eggle-ston said, will be a boon to the oldest high school in the district, Bend High. The school is adding a new two-story technical center, which will feature classrooms as well as wood, metal and auto shops, and room for drafting and other professional technical classes.
Located just south of the main high school building on property the district purchased in 2007, the center is slated to feature cutting-edge technology, and expand technical and professional class offerings. The center is likely to open in December.
Once these large-scale projects are finished, just a few projects from the bond measure will remain: a remodel and addition at Three Rivers School in Sunriver, a remodel of the Bend High auditorium and production kitchen, and some upgrades at the district’s administrative offices on Wall Street.
Sheila G. Miller
can be reached at 541-617-7831 or at smiller@bendbulletin.com.
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