Last time I told you about the books being removed from the school. They are still gone, by the way! If you haven’t already figured it out, by the time you read these posts, they are about a month old. Not sure how that is working out, I may try to make them a bit closer to the actual events, but I like working ahead some. I’ll think about it and make a decision soon.
For today, I will be filling you in on some of the various developments that have happened lately. Of course, with the weather, the grass is growing well, and there is a lot of it! Not sure if the whole property is being mowed by lawnmower, or if the northwest area will be bush-hogged once in a while. I do know that the person mowing the lawn had a puzzling experience the other day. If you can figure out who it is, you can ask them what happened!
Inside, things are also springing up. The classrooms now have the blackboards installed. You might think it is a bit early, but they were here, so why not? The list of stuff to do is long yet, so if something is available, you might as well do it and get it off the list.
There has also been a bit of work going on in the restrooms. We were given new cubicle walls for the main restrooms we will be using right away. There has also been a lot of very deep cleaning done by several ladies. They spent several days cleaning every grout seam in the rooms, and scrubbed the walls until they shined. Thanks to them, the rooms look like they are brand new. We are blessed that there are no broken tiles in these two rooms. Haven’t really looked in the others yet.
Some work has also been done on the restroom that is behind the stage. It looks like there were two separate rooms there earlier, but the fixtures were torn out at some point. We would like to get this area set up as at least one restroom, for use when we rent out the gym. That way we can have the classroom hallways secured during off hours. So far, the floor has been epoxied and some framing done.
Speaking of the backstage area, we have installed multiple plugins for cookers, microwaves, fridges, etc. Since we plan to carpet some of that room, we epoxied the area where the stoves will be. We are planning to use that area as a lunchroom for now, and also a meeting room, break room, whatever. If anything involves coffee and donuts, that’s probably where it will be!
I may have mentioned before that almost every other restroom in the school has had the beginnings of “improvements” done to them. Mostly this consists of tearing out fixtures and/or pipes, then just leaving it sit for the next person to deal with.
One important part of almost any building today is internet access, both for finding information, and security. Some office equipment may also be WiFi enabled to help teachers print documents. Being stretched out like it is, this building has some challenges. Being constructed of mostly concrete also means that signals need to be boosted every once in a while. At this point, we have the basic access installation well under way, but the rooms need to be wired up yet. It is going to take a lot of wire to get this place completely online.
Installing the wiring in the ceiling of the north hall was easier, because there are no ceiling tiles there right now. But since we also needed access to the south hall ceiling, I took on the job of moving every other ceiling tile in a line to the entry point of the wiring. Now that it has been done, I went back and replaced the tiles. Although we won’t actually put in new tiles in this hall for a bit, I like to keep it looking nice.
Well, that’s all for now. As always, if you would like to help us with work or anything else, or would just like to donate funds, please contact us. 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 money to us, and your identity remains private.
