Photo courtesy of Tricia Stelter. Marshall's Southview Elementary had new concrete installed near the loading dock over the summer in a list of district renovations.

MARSHALL — With just about a month to go until classrooms begin to fill up and buses take to their morning routes, the Marshall Public School district has worked over the summer to make building updates.

Most building updates consist of minor, common fixes, while the largest project has been installing a new automated control system for the high school.

Marshall Director of Operations Tricia Stelter provided an update to the school board Monday evening about what the Buildings and Grounds team has been working on this summer.

“I’m happy to report at this time, the Buildings and Ground staff, we are full. We have everybody we need,” Stelter said. “I just want to say I have such a great team underneath me.”

The team had some recent hirings of Phia Moua as the new supervisor of the team, Travis Paradis as the groundskeeper, and Paul Landberg and Matthew Kopitski as new custodians.

In the recent event of the Marshall area seeing nearly eight inches of rain last week, the district has worked over the week to restore any flooding that took place, most heavily in the middle school.

Stelter noted that the other schools withheld the flood well with an exception of minor leaks, but the middle school saw standing water or intrusions throughout the main hallway, technology office, students services, the district office and board room.

“Saturday morning (the day after the rain), I came in bright and early to check all of our facilities. Of course, this was the first one I walked into and walked into the flood in the F-Wing hallway,” Stelter said. “Right away, I connected with Phia, and he connected with his team … We got a plan in place, and you’ll see the crew that had responded. Everybody got to work right away.”

As for summer work, most schools went under routine fixes and check-ups.

“This year, you’re not going to see any projects that probably have a big “Wow” factor with them,” Stelter said. “We concentrated on more practical and safety related projects. We attempted to hit each building or make updates at each building.”

Park Side Elementary’s renovations consisted of resealed windows, concrete work, replacement of a custodial door, and removing an old water fountain that was out of order and a safety hazard.

“A lot of concrete work needed to be done at Park Side for safety reasons … Two areas are in the back of the building, and then we had an area out front by our childhood wing where we (installed concrete),” Stelter said. “Safety lights were installed. In some of the wings in Park Side, you would walk in if it was after hours, and it would be completely black … So, we installed safety lights so each hallway is lit through all the evening hours.”

Southview’s summer focus is on installing grass, which will continue through the fall. There has also been concrete laid near the service road by the loading dock, and there will be a safety line painted on the sidewalk out front.

“We’re going to add a safety line to that sidewalk. So, what you would see at Parkside, where students know when they come out of the building for a pickup that they have to stop at that line, and they can’t go beyond that line until their person is there ready to pick them up,” Stelter said. “That’s for safety purposes. We don’t want students to close to the curb there.”

There was a new parking lot space added to the CTI center as well.

“We also added a 90 by 150 parking lot for the warehouse,” Stelter said. “The intention of that is all of the equipment and supplies that you see in the back of the middle school here, we would like to take all of that and move that out to this new parking lot, along with trailers that we’re not using, so maybe van trailers, so they don’t have to sit in the high school parking lot.”

The high school, besides resealing the cafeteria window, updating the baseball field fence and fixing a water line, has seen the largest project done this summer with a new automated control system.

“Really what that is, it’s just a centralized system that controls all your mechanical, heating, ventilation, air conditioning, lighting and security,” Stelter said. “Our system is original to the building, and is now at the end of its life. We had to make some decisions on what we were going to do with that … Our system was no longer supported by the company that we were with.”

Installed by Johnson Controls, which the other district schools utilize, the new control system will allow all classrooms to control the temperature within two degrees of the setpoint to manage comfortability.

“It’s a project that’s going to improve the efficiency and comfort of our system … It’s much bigger than just a new software,” Stelter said. “We are optimistic that this is going to have major completion by the end of August … We are on track with (our) budget. We do have a contingency or reserve fund that we have not tapped into.”

Budget’s used for Long Term Facility Maintenance is a different source of revenue that is used specifically for the upkeep of facilities, and only used for building-related maintenance.