Another brick in the wall

By NANCY KIMBALL

The Daily Inter Lake

An extended thaw with still-shallow frost has left the grounds mucky, but this winter's ambitious construction schedule has sent walls and roofs of Glacier High School soaring up from that wet land northwest of Kalispell.

Paved access drives and a circular drop-off provide some solid walkways around the site at West Reserve Drive and Stillwater Road for now.

Windows are being set in place and by the end of the week the first classroom wing will be dried-in.

By mid- to late-May, the laminated arches over the building's centerpiece commons and main entry will be in place.

Clusters of classrooms - seven pods distributed between the four wings on two floors - are taking shape. Each of five or six classrooms in a cluster opens onto a "porch," or common work space in the center of the pod. A science lab in each cluster will be back-to-back with the lab in the neighboring cluster to make the most of shared space, lab benches and equipment.

A year from now, the building should be nearly finished and ready for crews to start hauling in desks, lab equipment, fixtures and the rest of the mountain of educational supplies that will make the school hum.

The school will open in fall 2007.

A tour of the building last week took visitors through a ground-floor maze of masonry and steel supports and bare concrete slabs open to the skies.

Generous second-floor classroom windows to the west open onto a surprisingly majestic view of the mountain ranges. Designers had expected the Glacier Park view to be the most breathtaking.

But up on the third floor, where pitched-roof "penthouses" will house heating and ventilation systems the size of school buses, the views get really expansive.

From those steel-beam penthouses - as yet unroofed and overlooking what will become 70,000 square feet in flat membrane rooftops across the rest of the school - a full 360-degree turn shows why this is not only a practical site but a beautiful panorama for what is the state's largest educational project.

Rimmed by mountains on three sides and a distant horizon of Flathead Lake to the south, the view includes the territory of future students from West Valley, Olney, Helena Flats, Evergreen and north Kalispell.

CTA Architects project engineer Corey Johnson said the project is 44 percent complete in terms of budget dollars committed. Construction has been under way for eight months now with 15 months left to go.

Shawn Baker of Swank Enterprises said about 55 men and women are on the construction job most days.

On Tuesday, a pair of giant cranes lifted a series of 4,500-pound steel roof joists into place over the gymnasium.

Earlier, the joists had been hoisted over the full-height concrete-block walls and stacked on the gym floor.

Now, Swank project superintendent Jim Noffsinger was on his walkie-talkie, delivering precise inch-by-inch instructions to the two crane operators on the outside of the two-story walls. He acted as their eyes as they swung the half-inch steel beams into place, spanning the distance between the pair of main girder beams, which weighed in at 5,500 pounds each.

No sooner had the joists reached their final resting places than a team of skilled ironworkers were scrambling out for their high-wire act, bolting and welding the steel in place and adding cross-steel supports.

It was the biggest lift to be done on the entire job, Baker said.

The gym floor will be versatile. The full tournament basketball court also will be striped for two side basketball courts and three volleyball courts, and can be curtained off into five P.E. class stations. Bleachers to seat 2,000 will ring the floor.

Overhead, an eight-foot-wide running track will circle the space, with provision for 1,500 seats in balcony bleachers. Those bleachers would be installed immediately if construction money holds out, or in the future if it doesn't.

Those two banks of bleachers on opposing sides of the gym will fold forward when not in use, leaving space for a wrestling room and weight room. Directly below them will be offices, storage and locker rooms.

At the opposite end of the building is the fine arts wing - with two music rooms for choir/orchestra and for band, three art lab/classrooms including a stagecraft classroom, a 600-seat performance hall, and a black box theater to seat 200 or 300, depending on configuration of the specific play set.

Every seat in the auditorium will be a good seat, built into a tiered floor extending from an apron just below the stage up to the full height at the back wall. Acoustic wall tile and ceiling clouds will offer the best sound setting possible.

Art classroom windows face onto an inspiring view of the Whitefish Range.

At the heart of the school is the commons. An airy, sunlit entry ushers people into the ground floor which is flanked on two levels by a suite of administrative quarters, guidance, school nurse, activities, school resource officer, several stations in a food court and a fully accessible library on the second floor.

From the split stairwell leading to the mezzanine over the commons, a full view running the length of the building is available. Hallways in both directions widen as they near the commons, with segments of serpentine walls along the classroom clusters breaking up the expanse.

Behind the commons/food court, the 30,000-pound biomass boiler already is in place. Efficiency is the name of the game here - trucks will back into an outside bay at the back of the building to dump wood chips, a rolling auger pulls them into a trench alongside the boiler, a conveyor in the trench moves them to the front of the boiler, where they are bucketed up to the fire chamber.

Next on the docket, Johnson said, will be design of the access roads. With timing for the U.S. 93 bypass project still up in the air, he said the school may have to build one access road to use just until a planned connection with the bypass can be built.

Reporter Nancy Kimball can be reached at 758-4483 or by e-mail at nkimball@dailyinterlake.com