Wednesday, July 30, 1997
Superintendent builds new school addition
By ROY A. JONES II / Abilene Reporter-News
DE LEON - If the new addition to Perkins Middle School is ready
for the first day of classes in two weeks, all of the Aggie jokes
that De Leon school Superintendent Dwain Bills has had to endure
will be forgotten.
The jokes certainly won't be on him.
When contractor's bids to build the new 6,600-square-foot addition
came in considerably higher than the school board wanted to pay
- and avoid a bond election - trustees turned to Bills and more-or-less
said: "Dwain, you're an Aggie. How about you being the general
contractor?"
Bills, a Stephenville native, pointed out his bachelor's and
master's degrees from Texas A&M were in agriculture, not mechanical
engineering, but added that he was willing to accept the challenge.
As a former vocational agriculture teacher he'd built his share
of barns and shop buildings, but he never envisioned overseeing
the construction of a school building, he said.
"It's been quite an experience," he said Monday as
he looked over the list of jobs still to be completed before the
school opens. "I don't think I'd want to do this for a living,
but it's been really interesting."
Technically, he explained, the school district itself is the
general contractor.
"But I'm the one here all day, so that means me,"
he said with a broad smile. "I've learned a lot and we're
saving our taxpayers a bunch of money.
"Our lowest bid was $300,000, and right now we're looking
at building it for $240,000," he said proudly. "You
can put up with a lot of headaches to save $50,000 to $60,000."
The new building was necessary because students - and teachers
- were having to put up with too many headaches.
"We'd just flat outgrown the middle school building,"
which was completed in 1987 and named for former Superintendent
James Perkins, who still lives in De Leon, Bills said. Bills became
superintendent when Perkins retired in 1986.
"We've had a lot of growth in elementary school and now
those kids are busting the seams in middle school," he said.
"We had some classes of 70 or so last year, and that's much
too crowded. We'll have more than 200 in middle school - sixth,
seventh and eighth grades - this year for the first time.
"We'd just run out of space for little warm bodies. We
had to do something," he said. "The hallways were so
crowded we had to stagger the release time of classes so everyone
could get to their locker."
The new addition will have four spacious classrooms, a hall
"wide enough to drive a tractor through" and additional
restrooms, he said. The exterior is being bricked to match the
Perkins building.
"We're just barely going to make it," he said, looking
over his construction schedule.
"The locker people are due here (Tuesday), the carpet
people will be here Wednesday, the air conditioner people will
be here Wednesday and the electrician will be here Thursday."
In order to complete the project on time, Bills insisted on
starting the dirt work before the school year ended. Ground was
broken in March and teachers and students were happy to put up
with the inconvenience and noise.
"If we hadn't started that soon we sure wouldn't be where
we are now," he said, pointing out that the project was "dried
in" - the roof and walls in place - when June's almost daily
thunderstorms would have stopped the project in its tracks.
"But by then we could work indoors. We didn't miss many
days. We were real lucky," he said.
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Copyright ©1997,
Abilene Reporter-News / Texnews / E.W. Scripps Publications
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