Safety drives construction plans, main office prepares for cross migration

From rebuilding tennis courts, installing digital clocks, and redoing the roof of the E-Wing, the district has given West some significant facelifts. However, more changes are still on the immediate horizon. Construction will soon begin on reconfiguring key aspects of the building, including an entire relocation of the central office. 

This decision was arrived at with one goal in mind: safety in the building. With the main office currently  located in the center of the school, far from the main entrance, it poses a safety concern to students and staff as visitors and strangers to the building are allowed significant and unnecessary access to the student population.

“The current guidelines from across the country are that the main office should have a double vestibule so that people can’t get passed to students who we might not want to get past,” Principal Erin Kohl said. “Any visitor coming in, whether it’s door 38 or door 24, has to walk past classrooms and through the building to get to the main office.”

Having a vestibule will allow visitors to no longer have to wait outside in the cold, but it will also prevent them from entering the building if not approved.

“A person entering would have to go to a window where Mrs. Bechard will be located,” she said. “She’ll be in the main office, but there’ll be a window where she can take people’s IDs and make sure they’re on our visitor notification log, and the doors into the building will be locked so a person who might not be approved can’t get into the building. 

While the window will be placed in the soon-to-be vestibule located at door 38, this safety gateway will be a physical  part of the main office, which will reside where the school bank, store, and C27 are currently located.

Since the main office is moving to a new location, Kohl understood how important it would be to keep student services and the counseling office close.

“One of the things we felt was very important was that right now, we have our student services, our main office, and our counseling office in the same area, and having those offices in close proximity is really important,” Kohl said. “So even though the main office will be separate, it will just be a little walk around the corner where part of the C-Wing classrooms are.”

Because the main office will be relocated to the C-Wing, some classrooms will need to be dismantled and moved.

“Part of the C-Wing’s classrooms will be dismantled and those will become the new student services and pupils services, and where the old office is, those will become classrooms,” she said. “We are basically swapping the classrooms.”

In the past, visitors were able to access both door 24 and door 38, but now to increase safety, door 38 will be the only place visitors can enter.

“We want to have the main office be the first place a person visits when they come to West, and door 24 will become an entrance only for students,” she said. “Door 38 will become the only entrance for visitors.”

Although the plans sound drastic, requiring remodeling of the school, there will be four phases taking place to make sure the project is completed before summer is over.

“The first phase is actually starting in just a few weeks. The school bank, the school store, and C27 are going to be emptied out in the first week of February,” she said. “We will have workers come in and do the asbestos abatement, so it’ll be all sealed off from the entrance.”

After the abatement, construction will truly take place.

“At the end of February to early March, the contractors will come in to construct the new main office area, which will house our two main office secretaries, the door 38 monitor, principal, athletic director, and records person,” Kohl said.

May will mark the beginning of phase two, which will focus on where the current main office is located.

“In May, the current students’ services office will start to be demolished, and the student services people will shift into the current main office,” she said. “It is going to take a lot of shifting and moving, but the rest of the process will happen over the course of the summer. It is supposed to be done in mid-August, so before teachers come back and school starts.”

Although the area around door 38 will be rebuilt, the door will still be accessible for students, staff, and visitors.

“Students will still be able to enter through door 38, but the one main thing that will happen is there will be a wall built around the three spaces where the main office will be, so it might narrow the hallway a little bit,” she said.

As to distractions caused by the construction, students and staff won’t have to worry too much about it.

“The work is being done after school hours, so they’ll start after school is out for the day and work until the evening until summer, so there shouldn’t be noise or things like that disrupting classrooms,” Kohl said.

The construction process puts into place district priorities emphasized in community referendum votes.

“This is a huge structural safety issue,” she said. “We’ve made so many improvements over the past few years, and as new guidelines come out, our safety team, or EPCOT team, will look over them and talk about ways we can make our school even safer.”

By Ruby Pluchinsky

Oshkosh West Index Volume 118 Issue 4

January 31st, 2022