Millions of dollars in school work underway

PALMER — As the summer grinds on, so does construction work at Mat-Su Borough School District buildings.

Construction workers are busy putting in new floors, building new roofs or just building new schools from the ground up. A borough list of projects in the works totals $214 million in value.

“We are, I think, two projects away from beginning every project on the 2011 bond,” Mat-Su Borough Capital Projects Director Mike Brown said.

But those two upgrade projects — $3.16 million in energy and $7.1 million in heating and ventilation improvements to various schools — will go out for design work later this year.

Included on that list are five new schools. Joe Redington Sr. Jr./Sr. High School is under construction now. Two other schools are underway and set to be completed this month, Valley Pathways and Mat-Su Day School.

At Pathways on Monday, workers were busy inside, but the outside looked more or less complete, even the decorative tiling was installed and the driveways paved. Landscapers were planting trees.

“I think what we’re targeting is to have those two turned over to the school district some time in mid-July,” Brown said of the Day School and Pathways.

So that’s three new schools. Construction has yet to start on the other two. According to the project’s website, the new Dena’ina Elementary School — which will be basically a neighbor to the Redington school — is 65 percent designed. The replacement for Iditarod Elementary School is similarly in the design phase. Both schools are set to open for the 2016-17 school year.

“Those new school jobs are 12- to 18-month projects for construction, and 12 months would be on the low end,” Brown said.

If you’ve seen construction crews in the parking lot of Palmer High School this summer, it’s because they’re doing $5.5 million worth of work on the pipes, mainly for the heating system.

“It’s stuff that, frankly, folks largely won’t see once the school year gets underway,” Brown said.

A lot of the projects on the borough’s list are more like ongoing projects. For example, six schools got new flooring last year, and nine more — the elementary schools of Finger Lake, Cottonwood Creek, Butte, Tanaina, Meadow Lakes, Trapper Creek, Larson, Goose Bay, as well as Burchell High School — will get new floors this year.

The $12 million worth of turf fields on the list are pretty close to finished. Brown says the work at Palmer, Wasilla, Houston and Colony high schools should wrap up this summer, with that bond project completely closed out.

Meanwhile, the district is working on different sports fields at nine other schools: Big Lake, Butte, Snowshoe, Swanson and Willow elementaries, Wasilla Middle School, and Palmer and Wasilla high schools.

Brown said that people curious about the status of various projects should try checking the borough’s website at matsugov.us, where they can find a link labeled “projects.”

Contact Andrew Wellner at 352-2270 or andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com.