In May 2012 a devastating fire tore through Woodburn High School and destroyed its career and technical education (CTE) wing.

But a replacement building and another two-story classroom building are finally on the horizon. General contractor Triplett Wellman Contractors is tackling both on the north side of campus.

The CTE building will have 10,180 square feet and the classroom building will have 17,200 square feet. That space will allow the school to retire 10 portable classrooms that were set up in the wake of the fire.

“There’s a lot going on,” Triplett Wellman Contractors Superintendent Nikita Cherepanov said. “That building going up there, that’s a CTE building; it’s going to have a shop and a video room. They used to have a trades program. And (the space) burned down.”

Cherepanov is quite familiar with the school.

“I am from Woodburn originally, and I graduated from this high school in 1996,” he said. “What a small world, right?”

The new CTE facility won’t replace all of the trades education space lost in the fire. But the technology and equipment will be state of the art.

“I remember going to that shop and that welding class, but now it doesn’t exist because it all burned down,” Cherepanov said. “Hence, the CTE (building) to replace it, because right now they just have one classroom and they just can’t facilitate that program with the limited space that they have.”

The two-story addition will hold eight classrooms. Both new buildings are slab-on-grade, with structural steel and steel-stud framing. A covered, curvy walkway will connect the two structures.

Crews have encountered challenges while installing the steel beams for the walkway, Cherepanov said. They’re heavy and curvy, and present unusual hurdles for surveying and measuring.

“But at least in this situation we do have a point of radius – that’s it over there, that stake,” he said, pointing to a spot between the two new structures. “Sometimes you don’t have that where you have a clear sweep, so then that’s even more difficult. This one it works out that we do have it, so that you can still pull a string and a tape and do your arch and you know you can make it work.”

The new buildings are scheduled for completion this summer, ahead of the start of the 2021-22 school year.

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In 2020, school construction has continued to be a bright spot for the building industry in the Portland-metro area. In Tigard, the $46 million Twality Middle School modernization is one such project that has kept crews busy. After ground was broken in late 2019, builders persevered throughout challenging times. The team expected to obtain a temporary certificate of occupation late this month.

“What’s left is just some finish stuff and the punch list and that’s about it,” said Greg Yoder, the project superintendent for general contractor Triplett Wellman Contractors. “The owner has their movers out here, and they’ve been out here for a good week moving stuff into the building one semi after another.”

IBI Group designed the project, which is part of an overhaul of an entire school campus that includes Templeton Elementary School nearby. The latter was rebuilt in a similar fashion as Twality Middle School, and completed in summer 2019.

Much of the existing middle school was demolished. A few portions were kept and remodeled, but most of the space was built anew. Twality Middle School now has a new gymnasium, library/media center, common areas, visual arts classrooms, maker space, centralized administrative offices and two U-shaped wings of wired-for-technology classrooms.

“It’s almost a new building,” Shawn Christensen, a project manager with Day CPM, the owner’s representative for Tigard-Tualatin School District, told the 91��Ƶ late last year.

All of the space is spread over two stories, with the ground floor nestled into a hillside. This provides a daylit basement and convenient access to the ground level from both floors. The upper floor opens to parking and the main entrance facing Southwest 97th Avenue, while the lower floor opens at the rear of the building to a pair of courtyards and bus parking.

Earlier this month, IES Commercial & Industrial was on site finishing low-voltage electrical work, while Hydro-Temp Mechanical crews were completing plumbing and HVAC work in the school kitchen and other areas. Personnel from the Beaverton office of Diversified were completing audio-visual systems work. Other workers were finishing the gymnasium’s wood floor.

Triplett Wellman considers school projects its bread and butter, and Twality certainly fits in that category. But COVID-19 has made every project somewhat unique because of the challenges presented to the workforce and suppliers of materials. This has been the case since March.

“We were way out ahead on our schedule, and then COVID hit and I think at one point out here in one week’s time we had seven or eight guys come down with it,” Yoder said. “And I know our steel fabricator, he was hit with it, so their immediate action was to shut their shop down. They were down a week so that had a little bit of an impact on us.”

Finding work-arounds and persevering through delays and other obstacles has become second nature.

“I think a lot of times, what causes these schedule impacts is guys don’t order their material when they should and then they want to blame it on whatever they can,” Yoder said. “But if you order months ahead you’ll usually get it. You’ve got to adjust for it, so you definitely have to be looking way ahead. But I’m satisfied with where we’re at. We’re going to get the building done when we’re supposed to.”

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Successful contractors often have a sweet spot – a type of project in which they excel because of past experience. For Woodburn-based Triplett Wellman Contractors, one of those sweet spots is the elementary school.

Triplett Wellman has at least seven such projects ongoing right now in Oregon and Washington, including one north of the Columbia River, in central Vancouver. The firm, with Darryl Giorgini serving as superintendent, is building a replacement for aged Walnut Grove Elementary School.

The project is being paid for with money from a $458 million Vancouver Public Schools bond approved by voters in February 2017. Construction is taking place on the same property, slightly east of the existing building that was constructed in 1952.

Bassetti Architects‘ design calls for a two-story building with three distinct wings.

As of Thursday, crews with Nutter Excavating were continuing to excavate foundation footings on the west end of the site, while operators of heavier machinery performed grading and other site work on the east side. In the middle of the site, a three-person crew from Piper Mechanical continued below-grade installation of wastewater lines, while another crew from Prairie Electric installed conduit.

“Right now we’re working our way out with the footings,” Giorgini said. “We did the perimeter, then the electrical underground and plumbing underground went in because the starting depth on the plumbing is deeper than your footings.”

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It was a balancing act, according to the project team.

That is, when facing a decision of whether to keep a portion of Twality Middle School in Tigard and add to it, or simply demolish the entire existing facility and construct a new one, officials opted for the former. Existing concrete shell structures will be kept and renovated, and eventually connect with a new, two-story building.

“It’s almost a new building,” said Shawn Christensen, a project manager with Day CPM, the owner’s representative for Tigard-Tualatin School District. “We kept 27,000 square feet worth of the concrete boxes in the gym, which is going to stay a gym. There’s another gym that we’re converting to locker rooms. And then we’ve kept the cafeteria, and we are converting that to music rooms. Everything else got torn down.”

IBI Group designed the $46 million project, and Woodburn-based Triplett Wellman Contractors is serving as general contractor. The school will gain a new gymnasium, media center, common areas, visual arts classrooms, maker space, centralized administrative offices and a full suite of wired-for-technology classrooms.

All of it is spread over two stories, with the ground floor nestled into a hillside. This will give the impression of a daylit basement and provide convenient access across both floors.

The school’s orientation will be roughly north to south, with the existing structures situated at the site’s south end. Construction is being split into two phases; currently, the first phase is under way at the site’s north end.

“The big push right now is just the framing,” said Greg Yoder, site superintendent for Triplett Wellman Contractors. “The site contractor was here today – it’s Catworks out of Vancouver (Washington), and they’re doing all the dirt work. And then we’ve got (PDX) Electric doing our electric, and Hydro-Temp is our plumber. And they’ve got both the wet and the dry side, so plumbers have been working getting the slab-on-grade stuff in.”

The building will have slab-on-grade foundations with wood framing and glulam columns and beams for structural support over the typical long spans found in schools. A curtainwall system will bring let natural light into the building from the west side, where new parking and bus pathways will be built. Both levels of the new building’s east side will feature vertically accented metal panels and glazing.

The project is part of a two-pronged remodel of a campus that also includes Templeton Elementary School. The latter was rebuilt in a similar fashion, with a portion of the 1960s-era building retained. That project was completed this past summer, and students and staff are now using the new space.

The project team decided to take a similar approach with the Twality project, though it remains uncertain whether it’s the most cost-effective one.

“We kept the (old) gym operational during construction, so it’s been a significant challenge to keep that gym free of noise and issues,” Christensen said. “They were thinking there would be budget savings with these giant concrete boxes, but as far as we’ve gotten into the building I’m thinking we might not have saved money by keeping the boxes.”

But the move allowed officials burdened by construction at both schools to maintain gym space.

“There were definitely complications associated with that for sure,” Christensen added. “And honestly they needed the gym. They only have a small gym down there at the elementary school, so using this gym has allowed them to run PE (classes) for 1,100 students.”

Similar choices were made with the old school cafeteria, which will tie in with the new building.

“It will all be connected,” Christensen said.

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