GRAND FORKS – Heat. Noise from large fans. Cramped workspaces. Six bathrooms for nearly 600 kids. No ventilation or air circulation, except for the gyms. No functioning science lab rooms.
That’s just a smattering of the deficiencies about a half-dozen architects, electricians and engineers saw – and felt – on a recent walk-through at a warm Valley Middle School on Tuesday morning, Aug. 23.
“I was here with my daughter yesterday (for the school’s open house) at 5 p.m.,” said Tom Wesley, principal architect with ICON Architectural Group. “Everyone was full of sweat and exhausted.” His daughter entered eighth grade this year at Valley.
“A teacher had a thermostat that stopped at 99 degrees yesterday,” said Becca Lord, a Valley instructional coach, told the group. Typically, the first month of school is “absolutely miserable.”
In Bri Nnolli’s classroom for students with special needs, she’s had students who’ve experienced heat-induced seizures, she said. A portable air-conditioning unit has been installed to try to alleviate the problem.
The professionals from ICON Architectural Group, Construction Engineers and CMTA have walked through and “put eyeballs on” all Grand Forks public schools, said Kyle Kvamme, director of community engagement with ICON. Valley is the last to be visited.
ICON has been hired to lead the school district’s efforts in preparation for another bond referendum, which will probably occur next spring. The referendum had been planned for Sept. 27, but the School Board delayed it, at the request of ICON, to allow the firm more time to gather data and analyze costs for a comprehensive assessment of facilities’ needs.
The litany of code violations – and conditions that impede student learning – has placed Valley at the top of the list among aging schools in the district that require major renovation.
In June 2021, Valley Middle School was the centerpiece of an $86 million bond referendum that proposed a combined K-8 campus on the current Valley site. Voters rejected that proposal.
The referendum included $6.5 million to build a new central kitchen building on the grounds of the Mark Sanford Education Center on the city’s south side. The central kitchen facility is currently part of Valley Middle School.
The ICON staff is working on an initial report, which assesses all the district’s buildings, that should be completed in September, Kvamme said. The report, which will include a summary of the cost to bring all the schools up to code and to make other changes to satisfy educational needs, will be brought to the School Board for review.
It will include a breakdown of the costs of “capital maintenance, code and compliance, and education adequacy deficiencies at every school in the district,” Kvamme said.
The ICON architectural firm plans to survey the public later this fall, to gain feedback on options for moving forward to solve the problems at Valley. The options would provide details on the costs to fixing problems in the structure versus building a new school.
Next winter, a series of three community design meetings, involving about 60 residents, will be convened, Kvamme said. Other residents may attend or watch remotely.
The ICON team intends to provide “accessible information,” and data that will allow “people to go as deep as (they) want to go,” Kvamme said.
As the group began its tour Tuesday, Wesley also pointed out that, although visitors must ring a buzzer to gain entry, “once you’re in the door, you have access to the whole building,” he said, noting how school security has come into sharp focus in light of horrific attacks in schools across the nation.
Safety and security in all Grand Forks schools has been identified by school administrators and School Board members as one of their highest priorities, along with indoor air quality, as they review necessary facility improvements.
In the smaller of Valley’s two gymnasiums, “all of the hard surfaces are very reflective of noise,” Kvamme said. “It’s like a big hard box, so it’s very echo-y. There is nothing to absorb the sound.”
Lord said, “You can’t hear announcements in here – so if there’s an emergency, they’ll never know.”
ICON principal architect Tom Wesley (left) and Kyle Kvamme, director of community engagement with ICON, lead a tour of Valley Middle School on Monday, Aug. 22, 2022, to assess the structural and educational deficiencies as well as code compliance issues at the northside school which was built in 1954.
Eric Hylden/Grand Forks Herald
Three floor fans, about four feet in diameter, were installed last year in hallways to help with air circulation, but they’re noisy, Lord said. “But, we thought, at least there’s something.”
In the school’s boiler room, Andrew Honeyman, senior mechanical engineer with CMTA, said the equipment “is well past its useful life – inefficient, hard to maintain. We’d put in a high-efficiency hot-water system.”
In one of the classrooms, Travor Fredrickson, senior electrical engineer with CMTA, who noticed a dozen or so devices plugged into a horizontal charging station, said, “there are more outlets than are accepted by code per 20 amp circuit.”
The small number of electrical outlets per classroom is insufficient for the needs of teachers and students who rely increasingly on electronics, such as Chromebooks and other devices.
“It’s not functional for the way we need to be teaching in 2022,” Lord said.
Other deficiencies were noted throughout the building.
The shower in the boys’ locker room is not up to code – at times during the school day “there are 40 boys in here,” said Lisa Vojacek, instructional coach and 16-year employee.
Neither are the handrails that flank staircases and the lift mechanism that bring students in wheelchairs to the weight room. It’s a “retrofit,” for which “you’d get a ‘pass’ for trying,” Wesley said.
Edges of hallways and other areas have been commandeered for storage.
“Storage is everywhere,” Lord said.
A sick child will not find a cot in the nurse’s office – not enough room – and, with the direct sun, it’s become known as “the nurse’s oven.”
Outside the building, “the site location, logistically, isn’t working anymore,” Wesley said. Out front, bus and parent drop-off activity “puts a lot of congestion on neighbors,” he said. And the number of semi trucks coming through to deliver goods to the central kitchen also impacts neighbors, Kvamme said.
The way students are taught has changed in the past 70 years, school district administrators say. That means the structure and configuration of classrooms have changed too.
At Valley, for example, a teacher who wants to work with a small group of students, apart from the rest of the class, often has to conduct those sessions in the hallway outside the classroom – not necessarily conducive for learning, Lord said.
Valley and the other 1950s-era schools in the district were built before the enactment of federal requirements regarding structural features and programs for special education. “Needs change,” Wesley said. “We’re not all driving ’50s cars anymore. Fifties cars had no seatbelts.”
The presence of good schools – well-designed and offering a quality educational experience – is “one of the biggest things people come to a community for,” said Tom McDonald, vice president of construction operations with Construction Engineers.
And, for students, Kvamme said, “middle school is such an awkward period for them – physically and emotionally– and then to pile all of this on top of that.”
If, as the result of a referendum, voters choose to raze Valley Middle School, “it breaks my heart to think of not being in this building anymore,” said Lord, who arrived here as a teacher 10 years ago. But it troubles her more when she thinks about what students cope with, she said. “The kids deserve so much better.”
“Teachers here work very hard,” Lord said. “They make the best of a less-than-ideal situation. There’s a lot of heart in this school.”
[ad_2]
Originally Appeared Here