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PLAINS TWP. — Foundations have been poured, walls are rising around door frames, and the stage is literally set for the stage, at the site of Wilkes-Barre Area School District’s new consolidated high school.
“I’m walking down Main Street,” Superintendent Brian Costello said as he trod a black, flat bit of ground. And while his optimistic vision of the school has previously been purely in his head, this time footers of concrete outline the main hallway — “Main Street” — of the future building.
On one side Costello pointed to a corner of the concrete foundation and noted that will be the planned ticket stand for the public coming to attend an event. On the other side, the outline of the stage front and beginnings of the orchestra pit are clear.
Nearby, steel door frames stand with walls of concrete masonry units (old-timers would call them “cinder blocks”) already about halfway up the frames. A large hole has been excavated for the natatorium. The land where the four classroom “pods” will jut like fingers from the main building is under preparation or already with foundation underway. The base of an elevator shaft has been excavated, framed with wood and latticed with reinforcement bar, awaiting the pouring of concrete.
As construction manager Michael Krzywicki drove his pickup truck around the site for a tour before stopping to walk “Main Street,” Costello kept track of where they were, regularly pointing to a rendering of the finished building on his phone screen, showing what part of the building will be where the truck was. “We’re in the cafeteria.” “We’re driving through the gym.”
Krzywicki repeated his expectation that at least two of the four classroom wings should be ready for interior work — walls and roof complete — before winter weather sets in, allowing construction inside to continue once the weather blocks outside work.
The wall sections that were already visible Monday were not part of those wings. They were athletic rooms. But Krzywicki said the contractors are doing whatever they can in one part of the site where foundations have been poured while waiting for foundation work to be completed elsewhere.
In fact, he said, he likely would have been unable to get so close to the construction site if it hadn’t been raining on and off Monday morning. More than a dozen heavy construction vehicles sat idle around the area, and he said on a clearer day most, if not all, would be in motion.
Costello clearly prefers to focus on what he sees as a big plus for school district students. He points to where the STEM (Science Technology, Engineering and Math) rooms will be, then to what he estimates will be the front of the new auditorium. He envisions a state-of-the-art facility that, at an estimated $121 million, he insists is still coming in under budget despite some additions since the basic contracts were awarded. “I think our kids deserve this,” he said of a school that will house students from three existing buildings, each either past or near 100 years old.
Krzywicki is less sanguine when it comes to responding to critics. The plan for this school on this site has been pilloried repeatedly by those — including candidates in November’s school board race — who contend it is unsafe due to dumping of coal ash and elevated levels of cadmium and arsenic in some soil samples. They also accuse the district of spending too much on the project.
Much of the criticism, Krzywicki noted, comes on the Facebook page for Save Our Schools, formed after consolidation plans were initially announced with the goal of retaining the current system of three smaller high schools.
At the end of Monday’s tour as the rain picked up for a while, Krzywicki sat in his truck and rebutted some of the criticism.
• One SOS post, he noted, said the pool for the school was costing $17 million. He said it had been budgeted at just under $5 million and so far totaled $3.7 million. Even if it is expanded from six to eight lanes, he estimated, it would cost at most about $4.1 million.
• The school is currently estimated to come in at a cost of about $260 per square foot Krzywicki said, and while it is much larger than other schools recently built in Luzerne County, he said is comparable when measured in those terms. He said the new Intermediate School nearing completion in the Dallas School District cost almost $257 per square foot, while the new Bear Creek Charter School in Bear Creek Township was $269 per square foot.
• Krzywicki said the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration had received video of the ground compaction process done earlier this year and came on site to check the dust being raised by the process. He said OSHA monitored the air and asked workers to wear masks so the filters could be checked for hazardous particles, “and they found nothing.”
• He defended the cost of a camera system at the site, which he said was $13,000 and serves as both quality assurance and anti-theft device. Along with video, it archives still images every 15 minutes that can be used in the future if there are any disputes with contractors about what was (or wasn’t) done when. And, he said, a similar camera system set up during construction of the new Dallas school cost several thousand dollars more.
Krzywicki chafes most at the recurring claims the site is a health risk. In the past, he has stressed that no coal ash has been unearthed in any excavation where the building will sit, and that the only place it was encountered was digging an entrance road to grade. While considerably more excavation has been done since he first made the claim, he repeated it Monday.
And he rejected claims by SOS critics who have said developers would not be able to build residential homes on the site because of the materials in the soil. “DEP (the state Department of Environmental Protection) Is holding the district to residential standards,” Krzywicki said, meaning clean fill caps of a specific required depth. “A developer would have to do the same thing if he were building a home.”
The debate is sure to continue, but as the tour showed, it has not stalled construction.
