Lost Creek addition to begin when school ends

COLUMBUS -- Work on a $1.8 million addition to Lost Creek Elementary School that will add a full track of classrooms, more than 40 parking spaces and shift the entrance from east to west should begin when the final bell sounds this spring.

Bids for the 12,000 square-foot project will be accepted at the end of March with construction likely to begin about May 25, architect Dan Keiter of RVW Inc., of Columbus, told the Columbus Public School Board of Education Monday evening.

Bid specifications for the Lost Creek project will include an alternative calling for a ground-coupled heat pump system that could add another $250,000 to the total cost of the addition, Keiter said during a design presentation to the board.

The addition would be completed about January 2010, with some nonessential remodeling of office and kindergarten space expected to be finished in the summer of 2010, he said.

Meanwhile, this will be the last year Lakeview High School baseball players can take the diamond for the Discoverers and Twin River High School wrestlers won’t be on the mat for CHS next season.

The school board let the district’s two-year cooperative agreement with Lakeview expire this spring and rejected a proposed two-year agreement with Twin River that would have begun this fall.

The board approved a two-year renewal of the cooperative agreement with Scotus Central Catholic in boys baseball, wrestling, tennis and swimming and girls softball, tennis and swimming.

In October, the board OK’d adding more kindergarten to fifth-grade classrooms as part of an ongoing blueprint for dealing with swelling enrollment at the district’s five elementary schools.

The upcoming Lost Creek project, located on the west side of the existing building along 38th Street, includes six classrooms, 46 additional parking spaces and a shift of the entrance and pickup/dropoff area from the east to west side.

The building’s remodeled administrative offices will also be shifted from the east to west side of the building, Keiter told the board. A pedestrian canopy near the pickup/dropoff area will be a second alternative in the bid specifications, he said.

The pedestrian canopy is not critical to the addition and could be easily eliminated if the project budget is tight, Keiter said.

In other business, parents of CHS students urged the board not to renew the cooperative deal with Lakeview and spurn the proposed agreement with Twin River (Genoa, Silver Creek and Monroe).

CHS students “who walk our halls,” should not lose an opportunity to participate because a student from outside the district chooses to participate under the cooperative agreement, Doug Moore told the board.

“We need to take care of our own first,’’ he said.

The CHS parents didn’t object to renewal of the agreement with Scotus because they said the overwhelming majority of the parents of Scotus students were taxpayers of the CPS district.

In another action, the board approved proposals seeking grant funds targeted at easing students’ transition to high school, boosting engagement with extracurricular activities and slashing dropout rates.

The district will apply for a Freshman Transition Grant and Comprehensive Student Intervention Grant.

The grant funds would be used for training to establish junior and senior peer mentors that would help incoming freshmen adjust to the demands of high school..

Funds from a student intervention grant would promote student engagement with school to reduce dropout rates and to develop life skills/character education to decrease addictive and destructive behaviors.