A building to last 100 years
<p>Joe Seymour of All Wall Contracting Inc. takes measurements while installing metal studs on Friday at the new Winton Elementary construction site in Coeur d'Alene.</p>
<p>Chuck Helton carries an arm full of metal studs to a room for installation at the new Winton Elementary Site on Friday in Coeur d'Alene. Construction is on schedule for the new school to be finished by Aug. 1.</p>
<p>Ryan Asker of Mountain States Electrical, installs wiring for some outlets in one of the bathrooms in the new Winton Elementary School site on Friday in Coeur d'Alene.</p>
COEUR d'ALENE - Baby blue Styrofoam scoreboard insulation obstructs an outsider's view of the steel skeleton within the new Winton Elementary School, but a walk through the halls shows it's coming right along.
"Up here it's drywall and electrical and plumbing," project superintendent Craig Turner of T.W. Clark Construction said during a tour Friday. "They're taping over there."
Electricians and construction workers are busy though the week building Winton and preparing for its opening date, which is scheduled for Aug. 1.
"I think that theoretically, we're on schedule, if not a little in front of it," said Coeur d'Alene School District maintenance director Bryan Martin.
Winton has gone from an older, 28,000-square-foot red brick school to an energy-efficient modern facility with enough space to accommodate three classes for every grade level. The old school was removed last summer.
"It was actually a real brick building made out of block and brick, and that was one of the big reasons why we ended up having to take it down," Martin said. "The cost to bring it up to code for earthquakes and everything, the structural that we had to do on the old building, the foundation, it would have cost us more money than to build a new building."
He said the old building "sat in the wrong spot. We wouldn't have had the parking lot, we wouldn't have had the playground area in the back. It just didn't work."
The new Winton will boast a much larger gym with a stage, a multipurpose room, an elevator and the entire school will be completely ADA (Americans with Disabilities) accessible.
"It's just amazing how Longwell Architects were able to fit everything together to make it flow and make it work," Martin said.
Winton's new exterior will feature red brick and pitched roofs on the main entrance as a throwback to the historic building it will replace.
"We're expecting this school to last 100 years," said Superintendent Matt Handelman. "There are going to be over 10,000 kids who come through this school in the next 100 years. I'm pretty humbled to think about that."
Handelman said he finds it remarkable that the new school's design increases capacity for students, parking and the playground all on the same space the smaller school previously occupied. And the quick pace of its progress is also impressive.
"I didn't expect to see it this far along and it's not even March yet," Handelman said.