Greetings! Hope everyone’s holidays went well. I’m sure the children enjoyed the time off, but I did see some signs that they also missed their teachers, which is good to know. We seem to be heading into a stretch where getting the children to school might be a bit more of a challenge, with the weather predicted to be getting colder and snowier. I am glad that I am past that time of life.
Along with the everyday happenings at the school, there are lots of small projects going on. We now have new chairs to set up for programs and such. The old ones, although they had really nice padding, were a bit dirty, and the padding meant that they took up a lot of storage space, which is something we don’t have in abundance. We were able to sell them, and the new chairs, which are designed to fit together, take up about 1/2 the space. I have been amazed at how little storage there was planned for a building that could hold hundreds of students. I suspect that if we ever get anywhere near capacity, we may need to construct a storage building of some sort.
On the subject of storage, if anyone would like to buy a folding cafeteria type table with attached benches, we do have one for sale right now. Contact us if you are interested. It is a very nice table, but just takes up too much room.
We recently completed some of the work that we had promised to the church that uses the basement. We made some improvements to the parking area, which is constantly under attack from the garbage truck that empties the dumpster. It’s great to have a dumpster, but those trucks are very heavy and anything less that a high grade blacktop or concrete area will soon be damaged.
We also installed carpet in the chapel area. The old flooring had some rips in it and was a hazard. There has also been a bit of work done in one of the restrooms to fix some leaking.
There are a lot of restrooms in the building, but most of them need work yet.
Speaking of restroom projects, we have been busy off and on working in one downstairs. At some point, it was decided by someone to paint large multi-colored squares on the existing tile! Not sure why, but is taking a ton of time to remove all that paint. I have spent some time there myself. The first time I worked there, I used a citrus stripper to loosen the paint. I found that was just a big mess, and actually made it harder to remove from the grout lines. The next time, I just used a razor blade scraper and it came off cleaner. If the decorator had sanded the tiles in any way to make the paint stick better, we would really be in trouble, but they just painted right over the tiles with no prep work, so that really has helped in removing the paint. It has been interesting to see how different colors of paint come off differently.
Not sure if I mentioned this before, but if you drive by the school, you will see that the north field where we will put baseball diamonds and park cars, has been disked down from the tiling project. Hopefully by this summer, it will be usable again, with new grass and no wet spots.
Our library has had another growth spurt. A local church that is changing hands contacted us and gave us as many books from their library as we wanted. I think we got a couple hundred, so the librarian has been busy getting them cataloged and on the shelves.
As work continues on numerous small projects, there is always a need for funds. We are continuing to work towards getting the south hall improved for next year, in case we need it. And of course, the roof still needs to be replaced over the south part of the building. If you want to help with a financial donation, you can go on our website, www.uccs.school, there is a Donate button there, or you can contact us for more information. If you would like to make a totally anonymous donation, there is a button on our website to go through the Anabaptist Financial group. You can direct them to send your donation to us, and your identity remains private. Thanks in advance for your support!
