WVOW News | A M Stone & Robert Fields
LOGAN Crews worked through the weekend at Logan Middle School to finish up work on renovations that got underway back when school let out for the summer. The project at the middle school has delayed the start date for students by two days.
According to an announcement Friday by Logan County Schools, the new start date for students at Logan Middle School is Wednesday, August twenty-first. This is delay only effects Logan Middle. All other Logan County Schools will start the school year on schedule this Monday, August nineteenth.
While Logan County Schools Superintendent Jeff Huffman said renovations at the middle school are “continuing to move forward as planned,” he also said additional time is needed to allow for site clean-up along the front of the building before students can be allowed to start classes.
“We are grateful that the contractors have been able to complete much of the work during the summer to minimize the impact on student instruction,” Huffman said in a statement on Friday.
The project was looking less and less likely of being student-ready by the start of school on Monday. The traditional Fifth Grade orientation, originally scheduled for last Wednesday, and the school schedule pick-up day for students on Friday were both postponed earlier in the week.
According to Huffman, the delayed start date will allow Logan Middle School to hold an open house prior to the official first day. That’s scheduled for this coming Tuesday beginning at five o’clock.
For more information, parents can call Logan Middle School Principal Brian Atkinson at 304-752-1804.
During a meeting of the West Virginia Board of Education in July, Logan County Superintendent Jeff Huffman addressed state board members about the $3,000,000 structural shore-up at Logan Middle.
The space that Logan Middle sets on was previously a parking lot on the island. Huffman said the area was mostly “fill” and push piers, around 220 of them, have to go down anywhere from forty to fifty-five feet to hit anything solid in order to stop the building from sinking. The push piers, around 220 of them, are essentially pipes that are jack-hammered down until reaching solid stratum. The piers anchor the building’s foundation.
“The traditional foundation was obviously not sufficient considering that anything solid is forty to fifty-five feet below the surface,” Huffman told the state board.
State Board of Education member Greg Wooten, of Logan, suggested the plans to build the school back in the mid-nineties may reveal the responsibility for a school slowly sinking into the river.
“There has been an original architect and an engineer that signed off all of this,” Wooten said. “Somebody signed off professionally and it’s not working. Now somebody is no doubt singing off on a new plan that says we go down forty feet and this will last forever. All of these are documents that need to be checked out. Somebody’s gotta be held accountable for tax payers now having to spend three million dollars to keep Logan Middle School from sinking into the Guyandotte River.”
Logan County Schools has been under state control since the fall of 2022 and remains so to this day. This is the second time Logan has been under state intervention in the last thirty years. Logan became the first school system ever to be taken over by the state on August 5, 1992.
Logan Middle was not the only school with renovations on the island over the summer break. Logan High School had electrical and HVAC upgrades completed. The electrical at Logan High dated back to the late fifties when the building was constructed.
Man High School, just like Logan, was constructed in the last sixty years. Superintendent Huffman plans to present a project this fall to address electrical and HVAC upgrades at Man High.
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