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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