It's coming down to the wire at Wolcott Street School, as several items in the district's $12.1 million capital improvement project are not yet completed and students are set to return in less than a week.
Superintendent Merritt Holly isn't too worried about all of the important things to be done before students return on Wednesday. Although he can pick up the phone for a contractor, he's not ready to pick up a hammer himself, he said.
"It would be worse for everybody," he told the Board of Education during Monday's meeting.
The contractor has had to deal with a shortage of workers, Holly said. For example, there's been one guy to lay all the tile in the remodeled bathrooms next to the gym.
"When you have one laborer doing tile, what more can you do?" Holly said. "Probably they'll tell you how lucky, you got one laborer. He was darn good at laying tile but he's one person."
The main thing with the bathrooms is having the partitions in place, and nobody expects a problem with completing that task on time. But even so, with one bathroom ready to go, that's all that is needed for the first day of school, he said.
The gym floor has been stripped and refinished but needs to be sealed before the first modified volleyball practice next week.
There are ceiling tiles to be put in place and general clean-up to finish yet, as well.
"Now we're down to four cleaning days left before kids are in the building, inside of classrooms," Holly said. "It's the responsibility the contractor to clean, and then we come in, check it to make sure it's up to standards, and then we finish it off."
As for the parking lot, it was supposed to be resurfaced on Monday.
"They were here today and were ready to go," Holly said. "Then the rain came and they were gone."
Before the parking lot is ready, it needs to be resurfaced and striped. The backup plan is to have staff park on the grass off Stanley Place.
As for how the contractors feel about the looming deadline, "they're saying they're not stressed at all," Holly said.
Top photo: Superintendent Merritt Holly and some members of the Board of Education in the hallway outside the Wolcott Street School gym explaining that eventually a mural will be painted along the wall that will tell the story of schools in Le Roy, starting with a one-room school house.
Photos by Howard Owens.
One of the bathrooms next to the gym has partitions in place.
The other one doesn't. Yet.
One of the gym equipment storage rooms on the second floor of the gym wing of the building.
The refinished gym floor still needs to be sealed.
The tile is down in one of the locker rooms on the second floor of the gym wing.
In the hallway outside the Memorial Auditorium, a new TV monitor will share school information and student accomplishments.
