Fixing Flathead: Backlog of needed repairs piles up

On a recent school tour, Flathead High School Principal Peter Fusaro walks to the east main office entrance of the school.

Turning the handle of the left door, he jerks it open. Along with the door, the frame is partially pulled out from the building before a slanted screw at the top left corner of the entryway, stops it from going very far.

“Little things like that” need repair, Fusaro said. “If we’re not able to replace them, what’s going to happen is somebody is going to open this door, or pull on it one day, and the whole thing is going to come down on them, so there are some safety issues.”

The “little things” and temporary fixes have compounded over the years without passage of a high school building reserve, so administrators are concerned for the safety and comfort of the 1,350 students who pass through its doors.

Fusaro has been with the district for 15 years and has watched the building deteriorate over time. The parking lots are pockmarked with potholes and gravel has been used to fill them.

“We don’t have money to replace anything,” Fusaro said.

To get money for repairs, Kalispell Public Schools is asking voters in the May 9 election to approve a $4,127,915 building reserve levy.

Many of the priority repairs on the district’s improvement-projects list are for Flathead High School, parts of which date back to 1910.

On a list divided into three priority levels, completing the top priorities at Flathead is estimated to cost $2,293,318.

Flathead High School is just one of several buildings in the high school district.

Priority repairs also are needed at Linderman Education Center, Vocational Agriculture Center, Glacier High School, the Central Office, Central Supply and Legends Stadium.

First priority repairs total $3,021,729.77. Technology maintenance would cost $202,200 for the high school district.

Then the district would begin to address second-level priorities on the list with the remainder of the five-year building reserve.

If the building reserve is approved, the yearly cost to taxpayers would be $10.20 a year on a home with an assessed value of $100,000 or $20.41 on a $200,000 home.

 The more than $4 million request, though, only would put a dent in the $10,560,952 needed to complete all three priorities.

Fusaro walked along the east side of Flathead High School. Nearly each first-story window is marked with a round gouges. BB’s are the likely culprit. Some of the gouges have been there for five years or more.

“We don’t replace them because they’re not shattered or broken and we can’t do it right now,” Fusaro said. “We were able to replace windows on the south wing when we had a building reserve.”

Inside the school, water leakage is a problem.

Fusaro points out brown watermarks and sagging ceiling tiles on both the first and second floors. Sources of the water are a leaky roof, cracked skylights and steam leaks from pipes that connect to the boiler heating system.

“There’s no reason to replace them [tiles] because the water will drip right back on them,” Fusaro said.

Electronics also are affected by water leaks. A fixed digital overhead projector in a first-floor business classroom hangs periolously close to a ceiling tile browned by water.

The skylights, while letting natural light in, have cracked, causing leaks in the library and a stairwell. Cracked skylights have been temporarily repaired with gray putty and a clear plastic liner filled with air from a fan to create a dome, so that snow wouldn’t settle on top and leak when it melted. The liner has expended its life span and has since been removed.

“It was probably on there 15 years — as long as I’ve been here — and it just blew out,” Fusaro said. “We would like to fix it. It will continue to leak and we’ll continue to do temporary fixes, but it won’t be fixed until it’s addressed.”

With the recent mild winter, there was not much snow buildup and just a minor leak required media specialist Murry Graham to put a recycling bin on the library stairs to catch water.

The library hasn’t been as lucky in the past. A long front desk partially located under the skylight lays bare, so that the past doesn’t repeat itself.

“We lost a computer once” from leaking water, Graham said.

The boiler room has one bucket to collect water from a pipe that isn’t close to a floor drain. Water streaming from one boiler unit has slowly eroded the floor.

A lack of a sprinkler system throughout the school also is a concern. To connect more sprinkler systems they would have to be placed underneath the ceiling or the ceilings would have to be removed and in some areas that would necessitate costly asbestos abatement.

In one entryway, there are long scratch marks on parts of the textured ceiling.

“This is all asbestos. See what happens is typical kids are jumping up and swatting it. They don’t know, or don’t realize some of it’s asbestos,” Fusaro said. “Asbestos abatement is very expensive.”

The central kitchen is cramped and in need of repair. Relocating it has been a separate issue for years in the district.

Lockers are a visual collage of decades past, with the most notable in the “fall hall” filled with brown, yellow and orange lockers. After years of normal wear and tear — doors slamming shut at the hands of teens hurrying off to class — some don’t close. Fusaro pulls open one locker that is braced with an unwieldy metal “T” bar.

“That kind of holds the door in place a little bit so it’s not so contorted,” Fusaro said.

With the long list of needs and a building reserve levy request to be divvied among all high school district buildings, it may take a separate bond request in the future to get Flathead High in shape.

“It is what it is,” Fusaro said. “For as old as the building is, as many kids that come through, we do a pretty good job of maintaining what we can,” Fusaro said.

Reporter Hilary Matheson may be reached at 758-4431 or by email at hmatheson@dailyinterlake.com.