Board to accept bid for DJHS construction

The Enterprise School Board approved a motion to receive bids for the construction of new bleachers at Dauphin Junior High School during an Aug. 27 meeting.

The motion was at the request of Superintendent Aaron Milner, who said he’d present prices to the board during the month of September.

“The bleachers at Dauphin were installed in 1968,” Milner said. “The boards are breaking, there are no safety functions and they are not ADA compliant.”

Milner said the school system’s maintenance staff will tear down and remove the bleachers and Dauphin’s maintenance staff would take on the task of painting the walls and cleaning the floors under the current bleachers.

“Seating capacity is either going to stay the same or go down,” Miner said. “That’s because new codes that require there to be aisles and we are also adding three or four wheelchair platforms, and we need those.”

The board also continued the discussion on potential renovations at Holly Hill Elementary School.

The board discussed adding a new gym, new lunchroom and kitchen area and renovating both the roof and exterior walls of the building.

“We think we could be able to leave the foam on top of the current roof in place and go back over it with a metal roofing that is pitched,” Milner said. “There are also metal beams in the current window system which are rusted and bad looking as well as old boiler pipes that haven’t been used for years.”

Milner proposed outfitting the front of Holly Hill with “store-front-style” windows similar to the ones recently added to the lunchrooms at Pinedale and Rucker Boulevard Elementary Schools.

Milner also suggested the bricks be reworked so the bared air conditioning units would rest against the new bricks.

Milner said the board would need to decide between adding to the existing lunchroom off of its backside and renovating the current kitchen or building a new kitchen and lunchroom.

“It’s currently wall to wall for the ladies working in the kitchen there,” he said. “We’ve been exploring the cost of renovating the kitchen but that could be as costly as building a new kitchen.”

Milner said more would be known about final costs once the board allows bids to be accepted.

Milner identified the masonry work and window replacements as the first steps in the renovations. 

“We want to move forward with the masonry and the windows because we know, that part, we are going to do regardless,” he said. “When you see it first hand, it’s going to make it look tremendously better.”

Milner said he’d be requesting to seek bids for these renovations during the September board meeting.

“It’s going to be one of the biggest projects at one of our elementary schools in a long time,” Milner said. “It should keep Holly Hill functional for at least 20 more years.”

The board also approved reapplying for General Liability Errors and Omissions Coverage through Alabama Risk Management.

The $21,300 policy covers the board from encompassing exposures under the offices of the Alabama Associations of the School Boards.

“It’s self-funded risk management program that provides insurance to our school board,” Milner said. “This is typically the coverage we’ve had from year to year.”