Longview school district looks to tile high school

Longview High School students could be rid of much-worn carpet after district officials discussed replacing much of the campus flooring with VCT tile.

The high school has about 105,000-square-feet of carpet that could be replaced and Assistant Superintendent Lynn Marshall said preliminary estimates based on the standard cost of installing tile could be between $250,000 and $275,000. The project is expected to be paid for with money in the districts fund balance, which the most recent audit of the district showed to stand at $48 million at the end of fiscal year 2011-2012.

We are not ready to do it right now, I just wanted to know if the board still wanted to pursue that, said Marshall, who at the last Longview ISD Board of Trustees meeting, brought the potential work before the school board.

The carpet is more than 20 years old and some school board members speculated that it could be original with the high school, which was built in 1976.

Its nasty and split and taped together in some places and stinky, Marshall said.

Marshall was approved to go out for bids in June, but held off because the work could not be completed by the 2013-14 fiscal year.

I was under the impression that we were in favor of it before and we held off because of time crunch, so I am still in favor of it, trustee Chris Mack said.

The goal would be to go out for bids sometime during the spring and then do the work during the summer.

What we wanted to try to do with that if we could was stay local; get the word out, get some specs get our bids together and be ready to jump on it as quick as we could because it is going to be a massive undertaking, Marshall said.

Marshalls update was made during a report section of the Dec. 9 meeting, and as such did not require a direct vote, but was merely used to gauge trustee interest in the project.

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Longview school district looks to tile high school