Zoe Bodovinitz, Staff Reporter
Originally published October 24, 2017
Georgia Piske Miller
Wayne’s Roofing workers strip roofing material on top of the school. The new roof will prevent leaks in the school during the winter.
Wayne’s Roofing has been working for five months to ensure that the school roof is watertight this winter for the first time in almost 20 years.
For years the roof has leaked during the rainy winter. Temporary fixes have been made for each leak but they pushed the water to different areas where it would continue to rain into the school.
Principal Keven Wynkoop has been a strong advocate for a new roof since the leaks started.
“For the last 19 years they’d find a leak and patch it. You’re basically chasing the water around the roof,” Principal Keven Wynkoop said.
Finally, after years of complaints, the school district approved the construction for a brand new roof.
“After putting lots of money over the years into these smaller jobs they went through capital projects and made it a major job to completely start over, rip off the entire roof and lay down an entirely new roof system,” Wynkoop said. “They did preliminary work before school got out and then as soon as summer started they brought in a bunch of extra people and really started going to town.”
The design of the roof isn’t changing but it is being improved. It will still be a flat roof just one that is built better.
“The materials they are using are very different and of much higher quality. More than anything the quality of the workmanship, I am very confident, is much better than it was 20 years ago,” Wynkoop said.
The construction has caused some disruptions inside school, mainly with the smell produced by the sealing process. In some classes the fumes were so bad they forced teachers to move their classes to other classrooms for the day.
“It smelled like burning rubber,” math teacher Kaitlyn Lundem said. “It was so bad we had to leave the classroom from 3rd period on. Thankfully other teachers let us use their rooms during their prep periods.”
The smell occurs when the workers finish a section and lay the last layer, which is what will keep the water out.
“They take little blow torches and when they lay down this roofing material they actually melt it. It’s kind of a combination of plastic and they described it as asphalt-like. They get it to a melting temperature so when they lay it down it sticks. This is what makes the roof watertight,” Wynkoop said.
The company taking the lead on the project, Wayne’s Roofing, is very aware of what’s going on inside the building and is very proactive in making sure the construction is not a big distraction.
“The construction workers the following day did a really good job at monitoring and figuring out how to control the smell. They had someone whose only job was to make sure the smell didn’t effect our classrooms,” Lundemo said.
Even with the distractions, this is a job that needs to be done. The leaks in years past have caused some serious damage to the interior of the building.
“There were a couple areas where there was mold in the walls and they had to completely cut out sections of walls and create systems to work around that,” Wynkoop said.
The whole project should hit total completion by Halloween.
