Architecture group shares results of school assessment

ANTIGO — At a meeting Wednesday night at Antigo North Elementary School, an architecture firm briefed a community task force on an analysis they conducted of the district’s three elementary school school buildings.

Architects from Blue Design Group, the firm the school district hired to conduct the analysis approximately a month ago as it considers whether to renovate or consolidate the buildings, gave a comprehensive presentation on their findings about the shortcomings and merits of the buildings.

“What we’re doing right now is validating what this task force had recommended previously as a part of our scope of work,” said Steve Jamroz, one of the architects. “Part of our due diligence is to study the facilities from an engineering perspective, whether it’s civil, mechanical, plumbing, structural, architectural, codes, and all of that stuff and then look at it from a needs standpoint and get the input from the staff, and then tonight is about telling you what we’re starting to find with the elementary schools. Is there a recommendation out there for a new elementary school? The last task force did recommend that, but we’re taking a step back and validating whether that makes sense or not.”

Steve Romatz, another architect with Blue Design Group, spoke the majority of the over two hour presentation, detailing a variety of issues with North Elementary, a school he referred to as being almost a carbon copy of the other two 60s-era buildings.

Romatz mentioned a slew of deficiencies — including safety issues — that have now developed at North, including a ventilation system flaw.

“The venting that was put in there when they put the sloped roof on is far less — far, far less — than what this building needs to adequately ventilate that attic system,” Romatz said. “To keep your attics ventilated, you need a certain amount of airflow coming from underneath your eaves and going out the top of the roof…this building compounds things a little bit more because when we do commercial buildings, when they get beyond 3,000 square feet of attic space, we have to put up a wall essentially, drywall on one side of those trusses, and compartmentalize that attic area so that it doesn’t get too big and a fire doesn’t just blow through there if something catastrophic happens.”

Another he mentioned dealt with the school’s handicap accessibility.

“One of our people came through and he said, ‘We have toilets of a lot of different sizes for a lot of different ages of kids, but none of them are at a height that meets handicap accessibility requirements,’” Romatz said. “That was the big one. Quite frankly, you don’t have any handicap accessible toilet stalls, so I don’t know what’s worse. For accessibility into the restrooms, you walk in, you have to make a hard left to get into that one room — I don’t even know that you could get a wheelchair around the corner.”

One of the most telling portions of his presentation dealt with feedback he’d received from teachers and staff at the schools in private interviews two weeks ago. All apparently wanted the schools consolidated into one building.

“My first reaction when I walked into the school, I sat down in a classroom and I said, ‘It’s a pretty nice little classroom,’” Romatz said. “The custodian came in and I said, ‘How long have you been here?’ He said, ‘Three months.’ I said, ‘What do you think?’ He said, ‘I think there’s 60 years of crud in every corner.’ I don’t disagree. Every school has crud in every corner. It’s a hard place to keep clean. It’s a tough thing to maintain…But what I heard from staff wasn’t, ‘Crud in the corners.’ It was, ‘We don’t have enough space to teach our kids what they need to be taught in the way they need to be taught.’”

Romatz went on to say that an important aspect of the issue now is that the school district’s current state of affairs by which it sends certain teachers to different elementary schools throughout the day is inefficient.

“You’ve got staff bouncing all around the place because you can not put an art teacher in this building and a music teacher in this building and another one at East and West, and financially, it will run a district into the ground,” he said. “But there’s value in this building, and that is going to be one of our goals through this entire process is to figure out what the value of this building is. I can tell you that you can make a recommendation to build a new elementary school, but I think you had better have a solution to what you do with this building if you’re going to build a new one.”

The community task force will continue to meet with the architects from Blue Design Group in the upcoming weeks.