After an inquiry at last week’s Highland school board meeting from member Heather Welch, Peter Miller, Director of Operations and Maintenance, gave an update on the work that is being done at the Middle School after a fire on March 20th damaged a significant portion of the interior of the school.

Miller said the majority of the equipment and items needed to restore the kitchen area and the IT equipment have been ordered.

“We have purchase orders out there for camera replacement and many of the other things that were affected by smoke and heat throughout the building,” he said.

Miller said there are “challenging delivery times” on items such as the walk-in cooler, a freezer combination, but it is moving forward.

“We solved a lot of other problems with coordination and at the Middle School; now we do have ServPro coordinating with the actual phases of the capital project to make sure things work at the same time so we’re not handling ceiling tiles three times to put up fire alarms, public address systems, cameras and any other work that needs to be done,” he said. Miller said ceiling and classroom work continues.

“The ceilings were removed in the hallways and we had to put reinforced unit struts up to hang the ceilings and the wiring from that was in the ceilings because there was a tremendous amount of communication cables that were in the ceilings. That work has been completed,” he said. “ServPro is currently having a team go through the building painting classrooms and hallways in preparation of putting the ceilings in, in the stairwells.”

Miller said there is cabling work that needs to be done, “as well as a building management system for the heating and cooling HVAC system that is being done at this point in time.”

Miller said a lot is underway and, “all of a sudden it’s going to start coming together. It kind of looks a little rough on the edges right now but it seems to be on track to being where we want to be. I don’t have a crystal ball, but it looks good at this point in time, schedule-wise.”

Miller expects that ServPro will be working through the entire summer, “not only in putting the classrooms together, with the ceilings, the painting and everything that has to be done there, but the floors have to be cleaned and waxed and all of the furniture has to be brought back from storage on Lumen Lane and reset in those classrooms. They’re [ServPro] is integral to that because they are doing all the transportation of all that material.”

Miller said as the building comes together a significant amount of final environmental testing will be cone, “to ensure that the building meets all the criteria and is safe for occupancy and there are no issues.”

Miller said the asbestos in the building was in the glue that was used to secure tiles to the plaster in the 1938 construction.

“The tiles had to come out to get the glue out and then they scraped down the plaster ceilings and then sealed the ceilings with a spray material that’s kind of like an epoxy paint,” he said. “Anything that wasn’t removed is essentially locked in.”

Welch asked if the building will be ready for the opening of school in September. Miller said, “Yeah, we can do anything.”