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Students enter new junior-high wing in Mineral Ridge
Photo
Dohar
By Mary Smith
MINERAL RIDGE
Seventh- and eighth-graders have left the trailers they’d been using as classrooms all school year and settled into the new junior high eight-classroom wing in the high school.
The new junior-high wing also includes a new middle-school science lab.
“It’s an exciting time,” schools Superintendent Damon Dohar said, as the district prepares to seeks bids on furniture and technology for the two district schools.
The high school, which is being fully remodeled, includes the new wing and a new junior-high gym.
Seaborn Elementary School essentially is now a brand-new building for kindergartners through sixth-graders after demolition, rebuilding and remodeling.
Dohar said the work is 60 percent done, and so far, under budget by about $350,000 for the $26 million Ohio School Facilities Grant program.
Both buildings will be completely finished and reopen in September.
The district is preparing to take bids on new furniture for both buildings, at an expected cost of $1.5 million, and also will seek bids for a major technology upgrade, which will include upgrading the infrastructure and increasing the speed on the districts’ Internet connections by 50 percent.
Instead of two servers, the high school and Seaborn will be on the same server. There will be 64 new computers at the high school and 52 new computers at Seaborn, and they will include the capability of running multimedia-based programs available to both buildings.
The estimated cost of the new information technology also will be $1.5 million, Dohar said, and including other multimedia factors that will cost about $3.5 million total, the superintendent said.
The new technology also will give the district a better basis for growth in the future. The district instruction manager and the district’s architect for the project will finalize the specifications for the projects to be put out for bid.
Dohar added the final two construction phases of the project will include asbestos abatement at the middle-school building on state Route 46.
That building is scheduled for demolition in October and November.