West Holmes K-5 school project remains on track for fall opening

Not so long ago, the hillside next to West Holmes High School was just that, a hillside.

Then it evolved into a skeleton of a building, and now it is a building with walls, halls, ceilings and stairwells.

Come this fall, that building will be alive with the sound of children roaming the halls and staff teaching students, and all corners of West Holmes School District will unite for the inaugural year in the new K-5 school building.

Progress on the building has gone exactly as planned, with the timeline right on schedule for an only slightly delayed beginning to the 2026-27 school year, expected to begin in early September.

“I’m amazed when I look at the photos before this all began and to see the transformation that has taken place,” West Holmes Schools Superintendent Eric Jurkovic said. “I’m so thrilled that we’ve stayed under budget and on schedule with the project.”

Fanning Howey was selected to serve as the architect for the 110,000-square-foot facility being built on the north side of the high school. Adena Corporation is serving as the general contractor for the project.

According to Jurkovic, the two have worked together to ensure everything remains on par for the two-story building.

Jurkovic said the blueprint has seen very few minor changes, and the vision that began more than two years ago is exactly what the district had desired.

With the hallway wings now painted in blue and red Knights colors, drop ceilings being placed and the foundational work now in the rearview mirror, Jurkovic said most of the process is behind them, and those who have been involved with the building progress are pleased.

“A lot of it has to do with staying on budget,” Jurkovic said. “We had to balance our wants and our needs, and we stayed within those guidelines the whole way.”

Currently, the district has a bid out for all the furniture that will be placed within the school building. In addition, Jurkovic said the district has listened to the desires of the teaching staff in designing what will go into the classrooms.

“We had meetings with the teachers, and we talked about what they’d like to see and what they liked and needed,” Jurkovic said. “They provided plenty of input, and in the end, I told them that we have a budget, and if what they want comes back under bid, they will get everything they envisioned. If not, we may have to adjust, but staying under budget is very important to us.”

He said thus far everything the district had hoped to implement in the project has come in on or under budget.

Jurkovic said the idea is to bring the staff in to view the building progress sometime in March for a tour. It will be then that the teachers can really start to visualize what their classroom might look like once finished.

“I’ve been getting emails from teachers wondering when they can come in and look at their rooms and measure them,” Jurkovic said. “Right now we don’t know which room will be whose room, but they are all pretty similar.”

As the shell of the school has taken shape, both staff and community members have seen it from afar, which Jurkovic said is creating excitement.

Jurkovic also continues to meet biweekly with the elementary principal trio of Brian Zimmerly (second grade through third grade), Steve Fowler (fourth grade through fifth grade) and Brian Lash (kindergarten through first grade), whom will all have roles in the K-5 building.

The challenges are many, with questions like how to best integrate students from each individual building, how will class lists be built, which teachers will be in which classrooms and more.

Jurkovic said the easy thing would be to keep each community of students together, but he said one of the goals of the project is to integrate students together.

“We want to create a new culture in the new building,” Jurkovic said. “They were all going to come together in the middle school anyway, but now they will all be together in elementary, so this gives them the opportunity to make new friends at an earlier age.”

Jurkovic said while it has been enjoyable watching the project move along according to schedule, there is anxiety growing as time marches on toward the first day of school because there will always be unknowns and challenges that will crop up.

Eventually, in late July or early August, the plan is to have several open houses, first the school board, then the staff and finally the community, with the tours happening prior to all the furniture being moved in.

Then a date will be set for teachers to get in and transform their classrooms, leading to the official open house when everything is set in place.