HOLLEY —
The second, larger phase of the Holley Central School District’s capital project is well underway at the under-construction campus.
Holley Middle/High School is undergoing its largest changes since the building was opened over the winter break in 1976. Holley Buildings and Grounds Superintendent Don Penna and his team have been busy keeping the district moving while moving classes and other necessities around the building.
Penna was one of the students who moved into the Lynch Road school after it was finished 35 years ago. The building featured an open classroom design that Penna said was ended within a few years. The walls added to close in classrooms have outstayed their welcome.
“This is a long time coming,” Penna said Tuesday.
The capital project is scheduled to continue into the 2013-14 school year, but Penna said the wait for final approval from the state hasn’t pushed the construction back too far.
“We’re making good progress,” Penna said.
When completed, the Middle/High School will have indoor courtyards, improved science rooms and extra space for teachers.
A pair of classrooms are currently being rebuilt, part of the first wave of high school rooms to be modernized with new electrical and lighting systems, as well as the new permanent walls. Classroom windows were replaced during the first phase of the capital project.
The improvements will increase the size of class rooms, a change visible in a suddenly shrunken hallway, where the two rooms that will be finished later this spring sit next to two rooms that are next in line for construction.
“The classroom wall have to be moved into the halls by a few feet,” said Penna as he showed where a bank of lockers has been removed to the other side of the building.
On the building’s south side, a bigger removal was made, with a technology and art wing torn down to make way for a new cafeteria. The rooms for those classes will be built where the current cafeteria is located.
Penna said the warm weather has helped and hurt different areas of the project. While the cranes digging out a trench for sanitary and storm sewers between the Elementary School and the site of a new bus garage had to deal with unseasonable mud, the team that tore down the high school’s technology wing to make way for a new cafeteria enjoyed above freezing temperatures.
“It’s much easier to pour footers for the kitchen when it’s forty degrees,” Penna said. The pouring was scheduled to start Thursday.
A wall on the building’s north side will be torn down soon, a few weeks after the nearby high school gymnasium hosts it’s last basketball game of the season. A multi-purpose fitness room is getting more use by contractors than athletes.
“The project has effected everyone, but we’re rolling with it,” Penna said.
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