Since March it has been a roller coaster ride of emotions for students, residents, faculty and staff as well as the board and the superintendent of Geary Public Schools.
On the evening of March 23, the gym on the high school campus caught fire and burned to the ground. Other portions of the school were heavily damaged and/or had smoke damage.
Once the shock and trauma of the loss subsided slightly – there were at least 50 years of memories tied up in the structures – work began on replacement.
That has had its own difficulties, according to Superintendent Sean Buchanan.
Initially the insurance company sent a contractor to estimate what he would charge to rebuild the lost buildings. That was in the neighborhood of $10 million. The contractor said the most cost effective move would be to gut anything that did not have heat damage – block walls, trusses, foundations – and reuse those structure.
Buchanan brought in other contractors to check the numbers and ideas of the first contractor, and those consultants agreed it would be safe to reuse the undamaged portion of the buildings. The decision was made to move ahead with that idea.
Then an insurance adjuster came to the site and at the end of his survey told Buchanan the payout was definitely more than $9 million, and that the company would advance the school district $8 million. This was in addition to a separate portion of the policy that paid to bring in portable classrooms for the new school year.
Nailing down how much there is to work with continues to be tricky, Buchanan said, because part of the payout will be based on depreciation. The policy will pay to replace items at today’s costs, a constantly moving target.
“So, the question became ‘What if we want to change the layout instead of rebuilding what was there? Do we have to build a gym? We have a gym that was recently renovated,” he said.
The insurer told the district that once the payment was made to the schools, it was up to them what to build or rebuild.
That turned out to be a blessing in disguise. When roofing in the portion of the school that was considered undamaged, the sub roof and decking were smoke damaged.
At that juncture, “We couldn’t move ahead,” Buchanan said. “We had to remove what was there.”
Before the fire, the board had decided to demolish the old superintendent’s office and the old home economics building. That was done while the demo crew was on hand to remove the burned portion of the buildings.
The district is now working with Easley Associates Architects in Enid to try and determine how much school it can build with the money available. That is still a moving target because there are some upgrades the insurance company will have to cover – like sprinkler systems – to make sure the new building is up to current safety standards and code requirements.
“This is a very rare situation,” Buchanan said. “It’s not typically how you go about construction. We need to know how much school we can get with this money, so we are being very methodical. That isn’t conducive for speed.”
A few years back, the district took a bond issue to the voters for a new school at a new campus site. Even though the bond issues did not pass, the board still has that list of what the residents would like to see in a new school.
“We are going to use the lessons learned,” Buchanan said. “We may never get this opportunity again, and we want to be very careful to be good stewards of this money.”
As for now, the students seem to be taking everything in stride. They are getting to the right classes at the right time and finding ways to get lunch even without a cafeteria at the upper level campus.
“They are showing such resilience in dealing with the challenges in ways that blow my mind,” Buchanan said. “They have amazing ability to do that and that’ s what I am most proud of.
When the financial determination is made, Buchanan said the district in conjunction with the architects will present what they are planning, and unveil that information to the public as soon as it is available.
Meanwhile the high school and middle school students are housed in the middle school building, the newly constructed four classroom overflow building, and the portable classrooms on the school site