Lockport School District 205 reviews structural risk of Central Campus ceilings

Lockport — The Lockport Township High School District 205 Board has learned more about the extent of the damage and risks at Central Campus after the Nov. 2 ceiling collapse of a third-floor classroom.

DLA Architects Principal and Director of Operations Eric Sickbert reported to the board at its regular meeting Monday that the WJE forensic architecture team has completed its analysis of the building’s ceilings and determined which areas pose potential safety risks.

Although only three classrooms immediately surrounding the collapsed room 310 were deemed to be at high risk for a similar catastrophic failure, several other sections of ceiling throughout the building were deemed “medium-to-high risk.”

Several blocks of classrooms on the north side of the building on floors one, two and three as well as select hallways on the second and third floors have been classified as medium-to-high risk, as have the ceilings in the pool and its locker rooms.

“Medium-to-high risk does not pose the catastrophic risk that the high-risk rooms did,” said Sickbert, who said that the high-risk plaster ceilings in the rooms around the collapse site already had been demolished and removed to prevent further incident.

Sickbert said many of the medium-to-high-risk areas are in the 1909 section of the building and were built with a similar technique to the 1920s section, where the collapse happened, but that they were attached more securely with iron instead of nails.

As a result of age, Sickbert said, some of that plaster may crumble and fall in chunks, but that would not pose a significant safety risk, such as the possibility of a whole ceiling collapsing.

Still, the prospect of pieces of plaster falling on students worried several board members, who encouraged Superintendent Robert McBride to explore remediation of “all the orange areas” of the map.

“The bottom line is we want to make sure the kids are safe,” board member Michael Travis said.

“Yeah,” board member Zyan Navarra said. “It could only take one kid chucking a shoe at the ceiling on a dare to cause another problem.”

Moving on that advice, McBride agreed to ask DLA and WJE to work out potential remediation options for the riskier portions of the ceiling after the final report from WJE, which he said should be complete in the next two weeks.

Once that report is in, the district will work with the architects to determine which areas should be prioritized and work on a potential schedule and plan for remediation.

That plan can be enacted this school year while students still are attending classes at Lincoln-Way North, since several of the areas that need work could not be easily isolated while the building is inhabited.

“Hopefully, we will have a plan of attack for Central by the next board meeting in December,” McBride said. “Then, if that is approved, we can go out to bid early in January.”

Currently, the district has reached an agreement with Lincoln-Way School District 210 for the students to continue classes in the North building through February, although the contract can easily be extended.

McBride said it’s possible the contract will need to be extended if the district moves ahead with remediating the ceilings, although he said it still is impossible to tell how long the students may be displaced.

“It’s possible the Lincoln-Way contract will be extended, maybe until the end of the school year, but we don’t know yet. We just have to see how long the repairs end up taking,” McBride said.

He said students will be back in the school before the more extensive renovations the district hopes to fund with a coming building bond measure are set to begin.

The proposal will be placed before voters March 19.

All funds for the ceiling repairs will come out of the district’s working cash funds and are not part of the planned referendum renovations.