Phase 1 of Kiski Area Intermediate School renovation to be ready for students' arrival

Parking lots at Kiski Area Intermediate School should be ready to use in time for the district’s first home football game on Aug. 30.

“Things are on time,” said Russell Del Re, a superintendent with PJ Dick, the firm managing the $25 million renovation of the school. “(Contractors) are doing what they need to do.”

Del Re said work on a new parking lot and stormwater system should mostly finish before school starts. Those efforts began in late May.

The lot will be usable by Aug. 26, according to Del Re, and will have temporary or permanent lighting in time for the high school’s first football game. The work is part of the first phase of renovations at the middle school.

Kiski Area Superintendent Jason Lohr said this week that crews still are making a few tweaks to the parking lot and sidewalks. Final surfacing is expected to take place next summer.

Contractors also are hard at work gutting the intermediate school as part of phase two. That leg of the project — and the entire endeavor — has a target end date of December 2025.

It’s all part of a vision to modernize the aging facility, opened in 1989, with heightened security measures, more common areas and an overhauled library.

District officials have not made detailed floor plans public because of security concerns.

As work continues, intermediate and high school students will have to share Kiski Area High School. Officials have described the arrangement as a school within a school.

Students arrive Sept. 3 for the first day of school. One of the high school’s three main buildings will be taken over by seventh and eighth graders, who will have their own cafeteria, gymnasium, bathrooms, bell schedule, school nurse and bus entrance. Some classrooms will be shared.

A trailer housing a temporary intermediate school office has been placed next to the new parking lot.

The project appears to be on track in terms of time and cost. School board members accepted two change orders Monday that essentially canceled each other out.

General contractor Liokareas Construction — which took heat from two Kiski Area School Board members in May for its cost overruns in the Gateway Middle School project — requested $14,300 to relocate a storm line. It simultaneously credited $13,400 back to the district for using conventional line striping in the parking lot instead of thermoplastic.

Lohr described communication between the district, contractors and PJ Dick as “excellent.”

Todd Sterlitz, president of the school board, said crews’ diligence and a spate of construction-friendly weather has allowed for work to proceed smoothly.

“It’s on track,” Sterlitz said. “And they took the big ramp out that was a really ugly part of the old school that prevented visibility from the offices to the front door.”