Walk-through displays ailing high school facility

School district urges support for $24 million bond measure on March 3 ballot

School officials, school board members past and present, and a handful of parents went on a tour of Mendocino High School Jan. 26 meant to demonstrate the need for a $24 million school bond set to go before district voters in the March election.

The school was built in 1947 and though renovations have been made ever since, there is no hiding an old, dilapidated building. Rust shows inside and out. Strange discolored bubbles appear here and there in the linoleum floors.

Maintenance Manager Otto Rice crosses his fingers when he talks about the sewer drain under the main hallway floor, remembering past catastrophes (the last backup meant no bathrooms in the main high school building for three school days) and hoping not to provoke a repeat.

Rice was the main tour guide. As the district’s longtime maintenance manager, he is intimately familiar with all the failures and about-to-fails.

A pretty random selection from Rice’s to-do list gives an idea of the type of items on the long list of repairs that make up the bulk of the projects to be covered by the hoped-for bond issue.

The thermostats have all broken in the main high school building. It’s hot in the library most of the time because the switches to the air handler on the roof above are all broken except for on-and-off.

“There’s rust all over it. All the electronics have failed,” Rice said.

The electrical system for the entire school is ungrounded. There are ways around that, of course, but for a stable, longterm electrical system, grounding helps.

The school’s main entry, builtin another time, is pretty much a straight-up doorway. School administrators and staff would like an entry where they can see who is coming to the door from inside.

The office itself is a warren of undersized rooms. The new design would streamline people’s workspaces and let in more light

along with better visibility.

One cost-effective project, Rice said, involves replacing the flooring in the main building’s central hallway. Every summer, Rice said, a team of custodians removes and reapplies up to six layers of wax on the heavily used hallways.

“It takes weeks,” he said, of multiple workers painstakingly removing and applying wax, much of the process by hand. Those are weeks, he said, that could be spent on repairs and renovations, or other necessary maintenance tasks.

Wiring in many rooms runs across the ceiling. The roof is stacked with rusting utility equipment. Rice said the plan is to build a covering for all of it and get it out of the weather, greatly increasing its life and reducing breakdowns. The biology and chemistry classrooms look like they were built in 1947.

Superintendent Jason Morse said it comes down to basics. “It’s just not modern,” he said. “It makes it more difficult to teach when you have old equipment.”