Elk River Area School District administrators and members of the Elk River Area School Board completed the second of three groundbreakings scheduled over the course of three weeks.
On Monday, April 25, they along with Otsego dignitaries, community members and members of the districtwide construction project team led by Stahl Construction stuck shovels into land near the intersection of MacIver Avenue and 80th Street Northeast in western Otsego.
The E-8 school will be about 124,000 square feet and cost about $23.6 million to construct.
The student population that will attend the school will be determined after district committees conclude their work in the summer of 2016.
The building is expected to open in the late summer of 2017 in time for the start of the 2017-18 school year.
The school is the centerpiece of a $98 million building campaign approved by voters in the 2014 general election. It will be the first district building to house early education learners, K-5 students as well as middle school students all at once.
Wold Architects and Engineers, the district’s primary engineer for the construction and renovation, collaborated with district leaders to design a building that can keep a diverse student population housed safely in one facility.
A week earlier, District 728 officials were outside behind Elk River High School’s gymnasium to throw some dirt in a parking lot to signal the pending start construction of a 23,000-square-foot addition and renovation project at the high school.
The project is one of four in a construction management program Stahl is leading for the Elk River Area School District.
Designed by the district’s longtime partner Wold Architects and Engineers, the Elk River High School project includes multiple gymnasium and special education classroom additions, the relocation and remodeling of interior administrative and classroom space, an updated roof structure, and improvements to the mechanical systems.
Elk River High School has an existing gymnasium with corridors on either side where Stahl Construction will be building a new snow load roof structure above the existing roof. With only a 3-foot-high space between the two structures, the existing roof must be kept intact while the new roof is constructed and then removed once the new roof is in place. The team will also conduct extensive mechanical work by replacing the existing large, cumbersome boilers with new, modular boilers.
“Between the current main office location, the current gymnasium location, the adjacent wetland, the adjacent ice arena and traffic flow issues, there was a fair amount of design challenges,” said Robert Sehm, associate at Wold Architects and Engineers. “The city of Elk River was a great resource during the planning phase and their continued support of the district helped the team work through a lot of these challenges.”
On Monday, May 2, District 728 officials will be at Rogers High School to break ground on an auditorium that will be completed at the school along with a third wing.
Work at Zimmerman High School has already begun on an auditorium being built there.