A Bedford construction company responsible for several expansion and renovation projects for Seymour Community Schools has been awarded another one.
At $907,615, T & G Construction Co. Inc. was the lowest of three bids the school corporation received for the project to renovate Seymour High School’s science classrooms and labs.
The amount includes the base bid plus two alternates to install 68 new lockers and 71 wall cabinets and pegboards. Other bids were $1,047,601 from Goecker Construction Inc. of Seymour and $987,800 from Poole Group Inc. of Dillsboro.
The project was awarded at a special board meeting March 1.
T & G Construction completed the Emerson Elementary School classrooms addition in 2013, the Margaret R. Brown Elementary School kindergarten addition in 2014 and renovation in 2016 and the Cortland Elementary School media center addition in 2016.
The school corporation has budgeted around $1.5 million for the high school renovation. Because of the number of rooms and scope of work needed, the budget is not enough to do everything.
The focus will be on three classrooms and two science labs. An alternate bid that included renovation of the current chemistry classroom/lab was not approved because it exceeded the project’s overall budget.
Superintendent Rob Hooker said the plan is to come back and finish the other labs in 2019. The rooms being renovated this year are more than 20 years old, and the other rooms are even older.
The Indiana Department of Education recommends 1,200 square feet for labs, and Seymour’s currently are a little more than 900 square feet.
The current design of the school’s labs with fixed peninsula tables around the perimeter of each room prevents them from being utilized for both lab work and instructional/lecture space.
By meeting with faculty and staff, VPS Architecture of Evansville was able to come up with a design that renovates the existing three classrooms and two labs into three much larger lab/classroom hybrids that are just more than 1,500 square feet each.
The lab tables will no longer be fixed and instead will be mobile so teachers and students can reconfigure the classrooms as needed for lectures or experiments.
Each room will be exactly the same so they can be used for chemistry, biology, physics or other science classes.
Construction could begin before the end of the school year and is expected to be completed by the end of the summer.