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Workers with Gil Haugan Construction have spent weeks cutting the Luverne school complex in half.
Crews are preparing for the demolition of eight classrooms from the two-story west wing of the high school to make room for the new commons and performing art center addition, which will be located between the elementary and high school facilities.
In the meantime, a public groundbreaking ceremony is set for 6 p.m. today (June 20) on the south side of the school.
Crews are carefully sawing through the concrete and steel reinforced beams from the breezeway walls in order to cleanly separate the middle-high and elementary schools.
An excavator will come in and carefully remove the current breezeway between the schools and the necessary classrooms from the middle-high school without damaging the existing structure.
Crews needed a 48-inch saw blade to get through the 24-by-24-inch steel-reinforced concrete beams.
“They are solid,” said site superintendent Dave Mulert.
Construction work began inside in early March when crews started demolition in the middle-high school auditorium for the new music education suites.
Demolition has been completed in the auditorium and crews began laying brick for the new classroom walls.
Since classes ended May 20, crews have been preparing the west wing for demolition, including removing asbestos-containing materials from the building.
Mulert said asbestos crews were initially expected to be on site for two to three weeks.
A month into the project, the crews never left.
“We’re finding asbestos in places that were not accessible until the demo,” Mulert said.
Pipe wraps, floor tile, glue, acoustic tile and any other materials suspected to contain asbestos were tested. Most have come back positive.
The middle-high school building was originally constructed in 1956 with additions added in 1965 and 1975.
“We’ve had some ups and downs (during the construction process) but taking care of these things now basically solves the problems for the next three pieces,” Mulert said.
Those “pieces” include construction of the performing arts center, and the two-story classroom addition on the middle-high school’s north wing.
The groundbreaking ceremony comes as the project adds new construction to the workload.
“It’s exciting to get to this point in the process,” said School Board Chairman Jodi Bosch. “You can see progress almost on a daily basis.”
Bosch serves on the district’s facility committee and has been involved with the project since 2016, when the board began looking at updating its long-term facilities plan.
In November 2017, voters approved a $23 million referendum to remodel the middle-high school and add a performing arts center between the elementary and middle-high school buildings.
The project was delayed in mid-2018 when bids for the project exceeded referendum dollars. Board members voted to rebid the entire project.
“It was absolutely the right thing to do,” Bosch said.
Groundbreaking was originally planned for the fall of 2018. The rebid process (which brought costs in line with the budget) pushed the groundbreaking to this summer.
“I don’t think we lost a lot of time,” Bosch said.
Instead of December 2020, the project is expected to be finished in April 2021.