The Crested Butte News Serving the Gunnison Valley since 1999
Schools should be finished by August 2010
Students will be able to attend classes in the newly renovated and expanded Crested Butte Community School in August 2010, according to Roy Blythe, principal and owner of the Blythe Group, which is overseeing the district’s capital improvement projects.
The architects and designers who work for the firm are on an “aggressive schedule” to get the projects going this spring and completed no later than the start of school 20 months from now.
The property survey for the Crested Butte Community School expansion has already been done and soil sampling was completed this week. With that information, Blythe said his team would be able to arrange for contractors to begin construction as soon as the snow melts.
For now, three of the district’s six projects are being pushed to the front of the line for construction to begin. The Lake Administration building, the Gunnison Community School and the Gunnison High School will all see renovation-related activity almost immediately.
“As early as February we’re planning on having bid packages out for structure and foundations and items like the food service equipment, mechanical equipment and boilers that will take a long time to get,” said Blythe.
Blythe told the RE1J school board at a regular meeting on Monday, December 8, that by August 24, 2009, the renovations at the Lake School and Gunnison Community School would be completed and ready for students to attend classes.
Gunnison High School will get some of the same treatment, with some of the mechanical purchases being made as soon as possible and the foundation and parts of the exterior structure being started in the spring.
The impetus for starting the renovations and expansion projects at the Gunnison High School is due to the size of the task and will put the school on pace to be completed by August 2010.
“We’re going to have two summers to work on the interior of the existing building, and then we’ll have the spring and summer of 2009, as well as all through the school year to do the big additions. Then we’ll have the tie-ins of the additions and a second summer to finish the project,” Blythe said.
Money for the projects will be available to get the projects going from the sale of a $10 million piece of the bond voters approved in November. That sale, which will be open to local banks, will be December 15 or December 16, with the second sale of a $45 million bond coming in January or February.
The rebuilding of the Gunnison Valley School, which attracted a lot of interest from local contractors, will be designed in the same way as the other projects but then turned over to a contractor to be built independently of the other projects.
“Because of the size of the Valley School… we’ve talked about it being a stand-alone bid project. We’d complete the design and then in the spring we would put that out for bids to be done by January 2010,” said Blythe.
Blythe also said that the Marble School has already put a modular building in place for its preschool addition. He said using modular construction for the other parts of the project was being discussed.
But renovations for the rest of the valley’s schools won’t be so easy, due to the size of the projects, the number of contractors to be involved and the weather that could be encountered over the two-year course of the expansions and renovations.
“Our train of thought is that we need to get in the ground this spring so we can put the walls up and be enclosed so we can heat it. That will allow us to work through the winter on the interior of the building,” Blythe said.
That will be the same approach to the construction at the Crested Butte Community School. A general contractor will be brought in the early spring to start the construction process.
Food service and mechanical equipment will be ordered early to provide contractors with work that can be done through the winter once the foundation and structure are built.
“We’re probably going to have two summers of renovations on [the Crested Butte] school. The first summer we’ll renovate the kitchen area and the second summer we’re going to renovate the administration space, as well as tying in the expanded area to the existing building,” said Blythe.
The plan for the second summer also includes the construction of the driveways that will link the school to the surrounding roadways. That will give Blythe enough time to coordinate the school access with Crested Butte’s master plan, CDOT and the traffic study that is being conducted.
In addition to the planners from Blythe who will be touring the school sites—they were in Crested Butte on Tuesday December 9—schematics for each of the buildings will be available for public review as they are completed, but no specific date has been set.
