By Sarah True
New technology may lead to saving a 127-year-old building on Greenwood Community Schools property.
School board members, in recently reviewing plans for a $2.9 million transportation center, learned that one of the buildings on the site is a log cabin, one of Greenwood’s earliest dwellings.
Revealing that information was Supt. David Edds, a former history teacher who is excited about restoring the cabin for educational purposes.
The proposed transportation center is needed to accommodate bigger diesel school buses.
“When you look at it, you wouldn’t see it as a log cabin. In the 1880s picture, it’s been added onto two or three times. But from what realtors have said, we think it’s a log house,” said Edds.
The transportation center would be on five of 30 acres the school system owns of the Bright Farm, 1348 Averitt Road. That’s where the district also could build another school, should it be needed, said the architects.
Project architects are Mark Bay and Richard Bay, Indianapolis architectural and engineering firm URS Corp. The Bays have worked on every building in the Greenwood district “at least twice,” Mark Bay noted.
If the district wants to open a facility in August 2008, the board needs to make a decision by the first of January, Edds said.
The facility is needed to work on diesel buses, provide enough space for training drivers on new braking systems and give the district room to build an adequate diesel fuel storage tank.
Some of the district’s newer 84-passenger buses stick out of current bus facility maintenance bays and it is difficult to get buses up on a lift for maintenance, Edds explained.
“We could buy more fuel at a lower price, if we had the storage room. And we need space for training. The new buses have air brakes and it takes more room than we have to train drivers on them,” said Edds.
The district has about $2.8 million in capital projects funds collected in previous years.
“We have money in future projects. There shouldn’t be an effect on taxpayers,” Edds said.
In other news, Pete Huse was introduced as the new Greenwood High School athletic director. Huse, currently athletic director at Danville Community High School, will start Nov. 1. He replaces Paul Collier who resigned.