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News
By Allison Joy
IRON RIVER – The West Iron County School District received zero bids for its request to convert the Stambaugh Elementary Stage area into learning space.
The district issued a request for proposals to design and build the project at the end of November last year. The intent is to remove the existing stage and convert the roughly 1,400-square-foot of space into classrooms, small group rooms, a physical education office and storage area.
The district has come under fire in the past for cramped classrooms with too many students, with board members themselves acknowledging the need to address class sizes.
The issue with the current project is heating and electrical systems that run beneath the stage.
“It would cost a lot of money to reroute this,” said board trustee Gary Pisoni, who also serves on the buildings and grounds committee.
“I just kind of wanted to have some open discussion on what next steps we want to look at,” said Superintendent Kevin Schmutzler. “There’s a complication of the amount of plumbing, boiler tubing, things like that under the stage. I think it kind of turns some people away, [having] to handle that kind of a thing.”
Ryan Meske, board president, suggested combining the project with another: retrofitting a portion of the high school library.
“We also know we have a need in this building for space, and there’s been some discussion that the library is a little underutilized, and that could be turned into a couple of classroom areas,” Schmutzler said.
The idea is to potentially carve out about 1,300 square feet from the library, which currently has a footprint just under 2,900-square-feet plus storage space, for additional academic rooms.
Pisoni said an ADA lift could be added to the Stambaugh stage for roughly $40,000 – allowing the current heating and electrical systems to remain where they are, and the stage space then still converted for its desired use.
“You can do it a lot more reasonably, and then you could be up and running right away,” Pisoni explained. “Just partition in front of the stage there, and you’ve got the floor and everything is there. Otherwise you’ve got to bring in some kind of mechanical engineer and try to redesign those pipes … It’s a major job to try to do that. I think the lift and redoing the steps there, I think you’d have all the space you wanted there and it wouldn’t cost you all that much.”
Meske took issue with the potential cost of having an ADA lift inspected annually, saying he would “be more inclined to maybe sweeten the pot, do the library too, and just re-bid the whole project.”
Ultimately, the board voted unanimously to combine both the stage and library retrofits into one request for build-only proposals, and search separately for engineering and design services.