Work continues at Kelsey Norman, Dover Hill construction sites
Aug. 3—While work continues at Dover Hill to prepare the ground for the foundations of a new school building, construction of an addition at Kelsey Norman Elementary School is about three months from completion.
"It's really coming together nicely," Aaron Hight, senior project manager for Crossland Construction, recently told the Joplin Board of Education.
The structure of the 9,000-square-foot addition has taken shape on the north side of the existing school, with the exterior brickwork nearing completion and sheet rock installation beginning inside. Once complete, it will hold kindergarten classrooms measuring 1,100 square feet apiece, which is the district's current standard for classroom space; "think tank" areas for small group work or meetings, similar to those that were built at Joplin High School; a large collaborative area, similar to those at Irving and Soaring Heights schools; and classrooms dedicated to the special education department and Title I reading programs.
Many of the rooms are divided by partitions or retractable walls, and most of the furniture will be easily movable. The goal is to make the addition a truly flexible space that can fit whatever needs the school may have, not just now, but also 50 years from now, said Kerry Sachetta, the district's assistant superintendent of operations.
"We're trying to build for the future," he said.
The addition also aims to provide enough new space for Kelsey Norman to eliminate its modular units, some of the last in use in the school district. District officials plan to designate the trailers as surplus property this month.
Hight acknowledged that the Kelsey Norman addition might have been finished six weeks to two months before its current target date of Halloween had the COVID-19 pandemic not happened. Many projects in construction are getting stretched out because of pandemic-induced disruptions in supply chains and delays in materials such as steel, he said.
Dover Hill
At Dover Hill, where a new elementary school bearing its name is being built, crews are busy preparing the property for construction, Hight said.
A mining feature on the site has been filled in and capped, he said. Some rock also is being exposed in the northeast corner of where the building pad is being laid, so Anderson Engineering is partnering with Crossland to fly drones over the site, mapping the rock and overlaying it with the designs to know "within a certain reason" how much of it they'll have to deal with, he said.
Meanwhile, another outcropping of rock, on the south side of Dover Hill, is "pretty substantial," Hight said. It's unclear yet what will need to be done with it.
"The hope is we could utilize some of that as a landscape feature, potentially, to help save on taking it all the way down and eliminating all the rock," he said.
Dover Hill Elementary School has a targeted completion date of fall 2022. Once open, the 67,000-square-foot school will have a capacity of 450 students and will house pupils currently attending Columbia and West Central schools, two of the district's oldest buildings.
Like Kelsey Norman's addition, Dover Hill will provide enough space for classrooms, extracurriculars and special education programs that Columbia and West Central are lacking.
The school also will be a safer, more modern building for pupils, especially for those attending Columbia, which slowly has been shifting, cracking and pulling apart due to soil conditions. Sachetta said the district continues to monitor Columbia for movement.
