A building to last 100 years

COEUR d'ALENE - Baby blue Styrofoam scoreboard insulation obstructs an outsider's view of the steel skeleton within the new Winton Elementary School, but a walk through the halls shows it's coming right along.

"Up here it's drywall and electrical and plumbing," project superintendent Craig Turner of T.W. Clark Construction said during a tour Friday. "They're taping over there."

Electricians and construction workers are busy though the week building Winton and preparing for its opening date, which is scheduled for Aug. 1.

"I think that theoretically, we're on schedule, if not a little in front of it," said Coeur d'Alene School District maintenance director Bryan Martin.

Winton has gone from an older, 28,000-square-foot red brick school to an energy-efficient modern facility with enough space to accommodate three classes for every grade level. The old school was removed last summer.

"It was actually a real brick building made out of block and brick, and that was one of the big reasons why we ended up having to take it down," Martin said. "The cost to bring it up to code for earthquakes and everything, the structrual that we had to do on the old building, the foundation, it would have cost us more money than to build a new building."

He said the old building "sat in the wrong spot. We wouldn't have had the parking lot, we wouldn't have had the playground area in the back. It just didn't work."

The new Winton will boast a much larger gym with a stage, a multipurpose room, an elevator and the entire school will be completely ADA (Americans with Disabilities) accessible.

"It's just amazing how Longwell Architects were able to fit everything together to make it flow and make it work," Martin said.

Winton's new exterior will feature red brick and pitched roofs on the main entrance as a throwback to the historic building it will replace.

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A building to last 100 years