Back field, tennis courts, bleachers are gone
Where the bleachers once stood on O’Neill High School’s Waldo Wood Field is now just a dirt hillside.
The old ‘snack shack’ is now an office trailer, sitting up beside the school building.
The track is gone. The tennis courts are gone. The football/soccer/lacrosse field is a smooth dirt surface.
In other words, the entire field area behind the high school has been stripped down to an empty lot.
Except … the foundation has already been poured for a new snack/restroom/storage facility.
And, huge blocks — that look a great deal like children’s building blocks — sit where the tennis courts used to be, waiting to be placed on top of a liner and filled in with crushed stone. There will also be water storage tanks put in under the tennis courts to collect rain water that will then be used to irrigate the school’s back fields. A similar system will be put in place under the front turf field (to be installed in the summer of 2020) and will be used to irrigate the softball field.
Around both of those things are people working; machinery operating and workers creating what will, just about five months from now, be a thoroughly modern high school sports complex, with a synthetic turf field, more seating, a new track, and better access for student athletes and their fans.
On the front field of the high school, in a fenced off area, there’s a massive pile of rocks, taken from the tennis court area, that will soon be crushed and returned to that area to help raise the new courts to the same level ground as the football field.
Also on the front fields, once sports seasons are completed and as school lets out for the year, storage pods will be placed on those fields to hold items from inside the high school that need to be removed due to summer construction there, HF-FMCSD Facilities Director Tom Fargo says.
Work won’t begin inside in earnest until the summer, but late-day crews (3-10 p.m.) are now doing some prep work inside, Project Manager Joe Tola told the Board of Education recently. He said electricians are among those working now. Also inside the building, he said, locker room abatement work will begin in June.
“We’re anxious for school to finish,” he said, “so we can tear this place apart!”
Tola will report to the BOE on the project again at its June 6 meeting.
