The Board of Education for Maine Township High School District 207 approved a bid for a summer construction project at Maine South High School at its May board meeting.
The summer project will entail emergency roof repairs for a section of the roof that covers the athletics entrance lobby. Repairs will include a temporary roof and take two summers to complete. Construction is expected to begin May 28.
In a letter from the Director of Facilities David Ulm to Superintendent Ken Wallace and Assistant Superintendent Mary Kalou, Ulm wrote that there have been persistent leaks on that portion of the roof even after previous repairs were made. Ulm said testing found the insulation under the roof to be saturated and dripping. He added that leaks subsided in the winter, but came back in the spring.
“The need to do this project now, rather than wait… was not apparent until the beginning of April,” Ulm wrote in his letter.
“At this point we have determined the best course of action is to perform a removal of all of the insulation,” Ulm said in his letter. “Then we will install a temporary roof this year, and then next summer we will install the permanent roof.”
Ulm said the reason that construction will take take two summers to complete is because the removal and reinstallation of the HVAC system will exceed the summer work window.
The budget estimate for the project was for $170,000 and the Board of Education approved a construction bid costing $119,00 from Anthony Roofing, a Tecta America company, of Aurora. Construction for the summer project is expected to end on Aug. 3.
When Kalou presented the bid to the board, she said the project was not anticipated. At the beginning of the 2023-2024 school year, the district had completed about $250 million of construction and renovations on its three schools, including Maine South. Maine South received between $82 million and $85 million for renovations and improvements at that time.
