TimesLeader.com

Ground broken for new Dallas High School; construction will start Wednesday

By Rebecca Bria rbria@timesleader.com
Staff Writer

Dallas School District officials broke ground Tuesday evening for the new district high school.

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Superintendent Frank P. Galicki helps Melissa Tucker, vice-president of the Dallas High School Class of 2012, break ground on the construction site as Tim Kennedy, president of the Class of 2012, watches.

Jonathan J. Juka photos/ For The Dallas Post

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The design development of the new Dallas High School is shown in this architect’s drawing.

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Administrators, school board members, school design committee members and students spoke about the new school and held shovels in the cool weather and limited sunshine as they dug into the ground.

Superintendent Frank Galicki told the crowd he became assistant principal of Dallas High School in 1982 and had to deal with a number of problems with the building over the years, including blown up generators, a leaky roof and explosions in the band room.

“It’s a beautiful building,” Galicki said. “It’s time for a change.”

The cost of the new high school project is expected to be about $42.75 million. The school is being constructed behind the current high school and is being built to accommodate 1,200 students with core areas that can accommodate 1,400 students since growth is expected to continue in the Back Mountain.

The school will be built in the area of the current practice football field and will be parallel to Mountaineer Stadium. A blue storage facility behind the current high school will be demolished and the existing high school will also be destroyed once the new school opens.

The new high school is scheduled to open in time for the beginning of the 2011-12 school year.

Dallas School Board President Karen Kyle, a certified public accountant, said that, when she was elected to the board four years ago, she told the district it could not afford a new school and would have to renovate the old one.

Kyle briefly spoke of the journey to making the new school a reality and fought back tears as she acknowledged the many students, some who have died, who walked the halls of the current high school.

Rick LeBlanc, a project manager from Crabtree Rohrbaugh & Associates, the architect for the construction project, said construction is expected to begin on Wednesday. LeBlanc says road work will begin at the front of the site this summer as well as the construction of a new maintenance building at the far side of Mountaineer Stadium.

“I’m standing in the lobby of the new high school,” LeBlanc said with laughter as he stood on grass. “Come back in a couple of years and we can walk through it together.”

Tim Kennedy, president of the Dallas High School Class of 2012, addressed the crowd. Kennedy’s class will be the first group of students to graduate from the new school.

“With what I’ve seen from the blueprints of the new school, I’m optimistic and glad to be a part of it and anxious to take my first steps inside,” Kennedy said.

The other officers from the Class of 2012 were also in attendance. They are Melissa Tucker, vice-president; Greg Selenski, treasurer; and Andrew Santora, marketing agent.

Larry Schuler, of the school design committee, said the group met the first Wednesday night of the month for the last two years to discuss the project. The committee consisted of 25 people, including parents, teachers, students and community members. Several school board members also regularly attended the meetings.

“I think it’s important to recognize this building is just a building,” said Schuler, who taught wellness at the high school for 32 years and is a candidate for a school board position. “What we do with it is equally important…we’ve made a lot of memories in these buildings, these fields, and I know this is going to continue because this is Dallas.”