By Owen Boss
Staff Writer
EASTHAMPTON - If a framed piece of the gym floor at Easthampton High School would help you relive your glory days or if you're interested in buying a locker from the hallway in which you once gingerly stepped as a freshman, you have until the end of the month to let the Easthampton High School Building Committee know.
Building Committee members and project managers planning the city's new $44.9 million high school surveyed the interior of the current high school Monday afternoon and took stock of anything that could be of sentimental value to local residents.
Although it isn't old enough to be considered historically significant, school officials are hoping there will be community interest in salvaging memorable features of the 51-year-old building, because it will be the city's first high school to disappear.
"Memorial Hall and Pepin Elementary School are former high schools, and they are still being used, and the fact of the matter is that pretty soon this high school isn't going to be here anymore," committee member Tom Brown said. "We're hoping to get a photographer in here to take pictures of it before it is torn down so we can have at least a record of what the interior looked like."
By the end of the hour-long tour, the group's message to the community was clear: Depending on the response from local residents, any part of the building that teachers don't want to keep is going to be sold, auctioned off or buried under a pile of rubble.
"If they want something like the eagle on the floor of the gym, they can let us know and we can let the project managers know that there is someone willing to pay for it," Brown said. "Otherwise we're going to drive a bulldozer through it."
Building Committee Chairman Michael Buehrle said he hopes to find a temporary location to store unwanted items, including desks, chairs and shop equipment sometime before the building's demolition in 2013. That way, he said, those items can be sold at auction.
Project Manager Mel Overmeyer of Strategical Building Solutions Inc. of Chicopee warned, however, that trying to auction off items with little or no real value can end up costing organizers money in the long run.
"You can spend the money you are trying to save pretty quickly if you end up paying someone to move all of this stuff out of here and then pay them again for a place to store it until the auction," Overmeyer said.
Residents interested in purchasing a part of the EHS building should contact Buehrle at 527-6595 before the end of January.
Story so far
Last May, city residents approved an $18.1 million debt exclusion override by nearly a 3-1 margin. The vote means that the city will raise property taxes over a 20-year period to build, equip and furnish a new 110,000-square-foot high school building on Williston Avenue.
The new building will replace, on the same 8-acre parcel, the existing high school, which school officials deemed undersized, worn out and lacking technological infrastructure, fire sprinklers, an auditorium and other features.
According to the most recent time line, presented by Overmeyer to High School Building Committee members last August, the building plan so far is as follows: The design development phase of the project, which began in July last year, is expected to last into February, when the project will go out to bid through the end of April.
Then, in June, the construction of temporary parking spaces will begin and the site will be prepared for construction through the end of July.
Actual construction of the new building will start at the beginning of the upcoming school year and, according to the time line, is expected to last until February 2013. As it stands now, in April 2013, students are expected to make the move from the old building to the new building to allow for the demolition of the existing structure and the completion of all site work by August 2013.
For more information about the project, visit the school's website www.easthampton.k12.ma.us.
Owen Boss can be reached at oboss@gazettenet.com.
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