FAIRBORN SCHOOL GETS UNDERWAY
Officials tout upcoming improvements as work begins on $27M school.
As officials gathered last week to break ground on the Fairborn Primary School, school board President Andrew Wilson was asked what will be different in the new building.
“Just about everything,” he said. The new school will replace a 60-year-old, outdated building, officials said. The new twostory, 132,000-square-foot building will be constructed next to the playground at the current PreK-2 school. It will cost between $26 million and $27 million and accommodate 1,214 students and 110 employees.
Students will remain in the existing primary school until fall 2020, when they will move to the new school. Intermediate students will then move from the school on Dellwood Drive to the former primary school while a new intermediate school is built. In summer 2022, the city plans to demolish the old primary school, and intermediate students will return to a new school on Dellwood Drive that fall.
The 2.95-mill bond levy funding construction for the new primary and intermediate school buildings passed by nearly 60 percent in November.
At a Friday morning groundbreaking ceremony at the current primary school, a few hundred staff members, teachers and parents celebrated the new building. Fairborn Mayor Paul Keller said in his speech that the building is “a huge step forward” for the city.
Keller said the current building doesn’t have the correct power distribution to handle modern equipment and computers. When it rains, water runs across the floor. Staff have been taping fans to electrical components to keep them from overheating.
The old building has a sprawl-
ing layout.
Wilson said there are probably a half-mile of corridors inside it. That poses challenges when staff move students around the buildings for events such as tutoring.
“Right now it probably takes five minutes to go and get the student and then five minutes to walk him back,” he said.
The new building will be more compact. It will also have centralized air conditioning, while the old build- ing only has window units.
“I think it’s awesome,” said Cheryl Wylie, who works as a special education aide to kindergarten students.
Wylie is most excited for the separate bathroom that will be attached to the room where the aids work with students.
Current bathroom layouts would make it difficult for aides to assist students in wheelchairs who wear diapers, she said.
“With these new schools, we really have the ingredients to put our city in motion,” Keller said.