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Resident voices B building options

Woleslagle says AASD should repurpose high school structure

A district resident said the Altoona Area School District should repurpose, not demolish, the high school B building as is currently planned.

David Woleslagle addressed the board Tuesday to suggest consolidating multiple district services at the B building. It could house police services and the central offices (both currently housed in the B building), as well as the tax office on Crawford Avenue and special education offices on 14th Street. In addition, there could be room for classrooms and the auditorium would not be demolished, he said.

“I loved it,” Ron Johnston said in a telephone interview Wednesday. “I’ve been saying that same thing for months. Everything we need for our district offices is right here.

However, he doesn’t think moving the tax office would be feasible because of the added parking that would be needed. However, the Eighth Avenue student registration building might be a candidate for consolidation into the B building.

Johnston believes there could be savings to the district. Right now, the plan is to purchase a new administrative building. The cost of that could be a couple of million dollars or more.

However, there would be pitfalls of keeping the B building — including the potential cost to heat it.

And if the board were to keep the B building, the district would have no site for an athletic field. The intramural field was dug up to lay the foundation for a structure to replace the 90-year-old B building. There’s no turning back on that plan, Dave Francis said Wednesday.

Francis would have liked the district to have further explored the option of building a new high school at the Pacifico Bakery site on Fifth Avenue rather than destroy the athletic field.

If the board could have built the new building at the bakery site, the tennis courts and athletic field on Seventh Avenue would have been saved and the original B building could possibly have been a more viable option to serve as a central office building.

“If we would have built at Pacifico’s, then it would have been easy to keep the B building. But that’s over with,” Francis said. “I think (keeping the B building) is something we can look at, but in all honesty, it will probably cost more money.”

The board would have to examine the cost of renovating the heating system in the B building.

“I don’t know if the cost of heating the building would offset everything. But the point is to house everything in one area, which I think is a good idea,” Francis said. “Trust me. We thought about it.”

Woleslagle suggested building the athletic field over the parking lots located beside the junior high school. He then suggested creating parking spaces by building a parking garage behind the A building.

“I’m not sure that would work,” Board President Dutch Brennan said in a phone interview Wednesday.

“We talked about those things as a board in the past. A parking garage is a lot more maintenance than a parking lot. That’s why we steered away from that. I get the concern of wanting to save the B building, but we talked about it for years, and I feel like it’s just coming up again. It’s an 11th-hour type of thing.”

Brennan said he talked with Woleslagle until 10:30 p.m. in the parking lot after the meeting ended at about

9 p.m. Tuesday.

“I think we’ve been down this road before, but to be diligent, I asked the administration to present the costs again — the cost of demolishing the B building and the cost of heating it,” Brennan said.

The building is several hundred thousand square feet.

“The options we as a board were talking about for all of the districtwide services that Woleslagle mentioned were spaces of about 35,000 square feet. It’s a little overkill to keep the B building for those offices, but we want to be diligent so everyone can have peace of mind,” he said.

Mirror Staff Writer Russ O’Reilly is at 946-7435.

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