Walls go up for new Gompers gym as Joliet District 86 construction remains on schedule

Joliet — Construction on Joliet Public Schools District 86’s two new junior high buildings is progressing on schedule, with walls for the new Gompers gymnasium going up this week.

Despite frigid temperatures and snowfall, construction crews at Gompers Junior High School, 1501 Copperfield Ave., continued work on the school’s new gym, with prefabricated walls going up Wednesday and Thursday.

The 36-foot-tall wall panels were hoisted individually by a crane and set in place, where the 10-man construction crew braced them with metal supports and attached them to steel plates in the foundation.

“We plan on finishing getting it standing today,” Chuck Bernhardt, the superintendent on the site for construction management firm Nicholas and Associates, said Thursday. “Except for the final panel, which we’ll need to leave out to get the crane and the trucks out of the way.”

Each of the prefabricated wall panels weighs between 31,000 and 66,000 pounds and is made of concrete around 3 inches of foam, Bernhardt said.

Even as snow fell off several of the wall pieces as they were lifted off the trucks carrying them, Bernhardt said the weather wasn’t a concern to the construction schedule.

“It’s just that time of year. Nothing you don’t see any other year, though it has been a while since we’ve had those kind of temperatures,” he said, referencing Monday and Tuesday’s sub-zero wind chills.

“The construction progress on the new schools at Gompers and Hufford is going great. There have been a few delays due to the cold weather, but nothing substantial. It is so exciting to see the walls going up.”

—  Theresa Rouse, Joliet Public Schools District 86 superintendent

The one hurdle that the team faced was a slight delay in getting the vehicles started Wednesday morning.

“The crane didn’t want to start yesterday,” Bernhardt said. “We couldn’t get it started until about 10 o’clock, and one of the forklifts wouldn’t start.”

Despite less-than-ideal weather conditions, Bernhardt said the team will be finished with the gym in time for the start of the new school year in August.

“We’ll have it done,” he said. “These people erect these things all the time. It’s a hectic schedule, but they never give me the easy ones.”

The 13,000-square-foot Gompers gym needs to be completed for the new school year so students can start using it.

The current gym sits on a parcel of land where the main building of the new Gompers school will be constructed, so demolition needs to begin on it in the fall to have the entire building ready on schedule for the 2026-27 school year.

The only other portion of the building currently completed is a series of towers at the far side of the gym structure, which will eventually become the stairwells and elevator shaft of the main school, where it will connect to the gym.

Once the walls are completed, the next step will be installing bar joists and metal framing for the roof, and continuing construction of the building’s block walls around the concrete ones.

The roof is expected to be installed in late February if weather conditions allow.

Although the Gompers schedule is the more complicated project to navigate because of the limited available land, District 86 Director for Communications and Development Sandy Zalewski also reported that the simultaneous construction at Hufford Junior High, 1125 N. Larkin Ave., also is proceeding on schedule.

“The construction progress on the new schools at Gompers and Hufford is going great,” District 86 Superintendent Theresa Rouse said in a statement. “There have been a few delays due to the cold weather, but nothing substantial. It is so exciting to see the walls going up.”

The stairwells at Hufford also are complete, along with much of the structure of the main office area, which includes a beam signed by the future first graduating class of the building, Zalewski said.

“They had more room over there, so that project was a little easier,” she said of Hufford. “It’s also a little bigger. There was less sequencing needed there with more open space.”

“I’m a little jealous,” Bernhardt joked. “They didn’t have a gym in their way. They have plenty of time to finish.”