LONG BEACH – As Steve Miller once sang, “Time keeps on slippin,’ slippin,’ slippin,’ into the future.” This song could be the prevailing, and perhaps fearful, theme of the Ocean Beach School District as it looks at the construction at Long Beach School.

The school will open as planned in September with the new classroom portion of the building completed and in working order, which will house the kindergarten through fifth grade students and a temporary office. It’s everything else that’s up in the air.

The move-in date for teachers and staff of Aug. 29 is the same for both elementary schools, a date which construction manager Russ McElroy said they are on-track to make for the portion most needed by the start of the school year.

“We’ll have this classroom building. We needed to get this main entry area done. There’s a lot of work to do,” he said.

A good portion of that work, and an unexpected one at that, will pertain to the replacement of boards that have rotted in the frame of the old portion of the building that is being remodeled. McElroy explained rotten boards at the base of the walls were found all the way around the old building, from the outside of the offices on the north side to the gym on the south side.

“They were totally rotted out, there was no support at the perimeter at all for the floor joists there,” he said. “They were unsafe conditions. You can see how this all has to be replaced.”

And getting it replaced is a major operation, but one that McElroy said would not deter the contractor from having that portion of the building completed in time to finish the schools transition over the winter holiday break.

The solution has come at a cost to the district – the hiring of extra crew to facilitate the work will cost upward of an extra $100,000. McElroy said the district is currently in negotiations with their insurance company to lower that cost.

“This is an unknown condition. We’re hoping the district’s insurer will participate in some of that cost,” he said.

McElroy made note of the construction of the building on the south side, which had the least amount of water damage, saying that if they had built the entire building with a concrete stem wall, they wouldn’t have the problem of rotting wood in the frame.

But why didn’t they know about this problem ahead of time? McElroy said they did know the condition – to a degree.

“On the north side of the building, that was designated on the drawings as a problem area. That was visible from the underside when they did some exploration under the building,” he said.

McElroy said that areas like the south corner of the gymnasium could not be explored because it was under the brick facade and couldn’t be looked at until that brick was removed.

“The first inkling we had that there was a problem was during spring break (last spring) when they tried to remove as much brick as they could while the kids were gone,” he explained. “We started to see some evidence of discoloration on the bottom of the plywood. A lot of it just wasn’t visible until you get into the deconstruction phase.”

The remodeled portion of the school will feature the offices, the gymnasium, kitchen, library and special education classrooms. Unlike Ocean Park School, there will be no cafeteria. The students will eat in the gymnasium once it is finished, a situation school principal Gary Flood is looking at with trepidation. He said they may have to split that facility in two during the three lunch periods they’ll have because P.E. classes are scheduled for the same times. The gymnasium will see the least amount of change during the remodel, virtually staying untouched. It will have a new, and very large, duct system running through it, and the walls will be repainted.

Until the new portion is finished though, it will be tight squeeze for some of the school’s facilities, especially the south campus building that used to house the alternative school.

District sixth grade students will be housed at the LBS campus this year while construction of the new Hilltop Middle School takes place. They will be placed in the two portables on the south side of the campus and in a part of that annex building. When asked if the buildings will be individual classes or if there would be class shifting for different periods of the day, new superintendent Rainer Houser said, “Often times sixth-graders do some class adjusting, my guess is there’ll be some movement, or it could be teachers.”

That annex building will also be the home of the special education class, the library, physical and speech therapy classes and nurse and counselors office. When asked if it was going to be tough making it all work in such a little space, Flood replied, “it’ll be nice when its done.”

What is on it’s way to being done is the new portion of the school. On the inside, Long Beach School is a little farther along than the school in Ocean Park, mainly because they’ve had less work to do with only having to really concentrate on that portion thus far.

A tour through the inside of the nearly completed new classroom wing shows many improvements over the past month, including a majority of the floor tiling set, cabinets and book shelves being installed in the classrooms, and walls painted, for the most part. The classrooms will be white, a move likely chosen for the amount of light it will reflect to brighten things up on a cloudy day. The school will, for the most part, including classrooms, feature vinyl composition tile flooring, except in the office, where there will be carpeting. The idea was that tile is easier to keep clean.

“From a hygienic point of view, tile harbors fewer germs than carpet does,” said McElroy.

The lockers for the school have also been installed, with full double-stack lockers upstairs, and lower half sets downstairs – the older students will be housed upstairs. McElroy said that the walls above the lockers downstairs will feature tack board, which were delivered Monday, in order to post student artwork and such. The bathrooms are being finished up, with toilet partitions being installed.

The main entry and foyer is taking grand shape, with it’s open vaulted ceiling and panels of windows. Not to be outdone too much, the southwestern entry to the building will also feature large windows brightening the stairwell hallway.

“It opens it up and I think in the gray wintertime it’ll be a real welcoming sort of space,” McElroy said.

Out in front of the school, backhoes were busy preparing for the installation of light poles, the completion of which will usher in the beginning of landscaping for the area for the drop-off loop portion near the main entrance and the parking lot. The road that eventually will traverse all the way around the building to better accommodate the drop-off and pick-up of bussed students will not be completed by the start of school. McElroy said they will have to improvise with the other entries until then.

He said he expected the gym to at least have the Tyvek vapor barrier on it by the time school starts, possibly even the siding. He said the area around back of the old school, where construction will continue, will have a barrier placed around it for safety.

As most have already noticed, the school has already received its color scheme, that of a mossy green with light tan trim around the taller portions of the building. McElroy said that when the rest of the building is completed it will match.

According to McElroy, the architects had originally thought to use some of the bright red colors from the Port of Ilwaco in its color scheme for the building, but changed their mind.

“They thought it was sort of a community statement, but the general feeling was that wouldn’t fit with the neighborhood,” he said of the colors.

And looking ahead to the final completion of the building, in time for a move over the winter holiday break this year, superintendent Houser said, “We have pretty good assurances they’ll be finished by December. I think they’ve given themselves an appropriate amount of time to make that happen.”