Jim McNally | .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) | Jan. 29, 2008

Iredell-Statesville Schools hired McCall Brothers Inc. to tear down the front portion of Celeste Henkel Elementary School.
They have not wasted any time.

Piles of old radiators, metal pipes, rebar, angle-iron and wire are intermixed with heaps of brick, cinder block and the dust of dried mortar at the site off Old Mountain Road.

McCall Brothers employee Mike Holcomb said the “fun part” of a demolition project is knocking down the walls and making a mess of things. The hard part is carting off the debris and cleaning the place up.

In the few days Holcomb has been on the job, several people have come by for souvenirs of the 82-year-old school that is getting something more in line with a multiple organ transplant than a makeover.

“They mostly take a brick or something small,” Holcomb said. “But one person picked up a whole load of bricks.”

Most of the rubble the nostalgic leave behind can be recycled.
“The only thing that goes to the landfill is the wood,” Holcomb said.

But Henkel administrators are not so caught up with the out-with-the-old part of the process so much as they are enthusiastic about the in-with-the-new part that will follow.
“We’re very excited,” said Principal Steve Sheets. “It’s going to be quite a big change from what we have now.”

Sheets said the renovation will transform Henkel “from a campus to a school building.”

He said the new facility would be self-contained and that the mobile classrooms would no longer be needed.

“For the first time in my 13 years here, we won’t have to take coats on and off to go from one part of the school to another.”
Assistant Principal Lucille Bassett said the transition “has gone remarkably well.”

The relocating process took place in shifts.

“It was like a domino effect,” Bassett explained. “We moved little by little until we got it all.”

Bassett credited the I-SS maintenance team with the seamlessness of the move.

“They did a phenomenal job of making this work,” she said.

When completed, the new Celeste Henkel Elementary will be about one-third larger than it was prior to the demolition.

Currently, there are just less than 600 students at the school. When the new facility opens, in time for the start of the 2009-10 school year, it will be able to accommodate about 800 students.

Rob Jackson, I-SS director of school construction, said the work at Henkel is part of the second phase of an ambitious undertaking by the district to update and expand schools.

Statesville High School was the first of seven schools included in Phase II of the program, which, Jackson said, is aimed at ensuring all the schools in the system have modern heating and air-conditioning as well as the space to accommodate the county’s growth.

Phase I - which included work on 11 schools - and Phase II each cost $85 million.

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