From left, La Center School District Superintendent Dave Holmes, LCSD Board Chairman Todd Jones, Education Service District 112 Construction Manager Keith Bloom, LCSD board member Wendy Chord, Rob Porter, of Robinson Construction, and LCSD board member Cris Yaw prepare for a ceremonial groundbreaking on a new La Center Middle School May 7.
Though regular classes in the La Center School District have made a move to remote lessons amid the COVID-19 pandemic, signs of bigger and better opportunities when buildings reopen for students were seen with the beginning of construction of a new district middle school last week.
Clad in more protection than usual on the job site with face masks, district officials, school board members and contractor employees gathered for a groundbreaking ceremony at the site of the future school on Northeast Lockwood Creek Road East of downtown. The groundbreaking was for an 81,000-square-foot, two-story facility designed to hold 550 students, according to design documents, with an estimated cost of construction at $35.5 million according to the accepted bid awarded to contractor Robinson Construction.
LCSD Superintendent Dave Holmes said it was “very rewarding” to have ground officially broken given the time since a construction bond passed in 2018 with close to 66 percent approval of district voters.
Holmes said building a new school had been one of the board’s goals since he returned to the district in 2016, having previously served as an assistant superintendent and La Center High School principal. He said the current construction schedule will have the building ready for students by Fall 2021.
Though COVID-19 has halted in-building education and led to drastic changes in the 2019-2020 school year, Holmes said that waiting for favorable weather was the biggest factor into why ground broke in May. He noted that Gov. Jay Inslee’s orders that momentarily postponed construction did not affect public works projects such as school construction.
“It was just a matter of waiting for the ground to dry out,” Holmes said. The district had identified the start of May as the beginning of construction around the time the construction bid request went out late last year.
LCSD Board President Todd Jones noted that the middle school project was putting people to work while businesses deemed non-essential had been shuttered due to COVID-19. Holmes said that a sizable portion of the school population had families supported by the construction industry, noting he’s personally seen subcontractors with students in the district.
“The families that voted for the bond and paying taxes to build the building are actually going to be, in some degree, benefitting from work that’s occurring on-site,” Holmes said.
