Archive: News

The Lansing Varsity Girl's Swimming and Diving Team season was hugely successful this year, with the Ladycats ending a perfect regular season with the fourth Class C Finals for Section IV championship in a row.  The team triumphed under the guidance of coach Diane Hicks-Hughes despite the fact that their home pool was closed for repairs.  District officials hoped the pool would reopen before the end of the fall season, but now it looks as if it will remain closed for at least part of the winter Boy's Swimming and Diving season.  School Business Administrator Mary June says pool repairs have been halted while an investigation of past repairs is being conducted.

"We had our first debriefing on preliminary findings from the forensic team that is looking into the pool,"  King told the Board Of Education Monday.  "We asked them to further their lab testing on the materials involved, the grouts and the various stages of materials between the bottom of the pool and the tile.  They had very comprehensive discussion prepared for us on the things that they had found and the things that they were looking into."

King said she is not ready to share details of the findings because they are only very preliminary results.  Pool repairs are a part of the current $6,450,000 SMART (Security, Mechanical, Architectural, Reconstruction, Technology) capital project that was nearing completion.  But problems with pool repairs made only a few years ago have temporarily halted the project.

In 2013 pool repairs were also part of the $3,033,054 The Building Core Reconstruction (BCR) Project.  In both cases team practices and meets were forced to move to other pools.  The 2014 repairs were completed late reportedly because delays in getting a subcontractor to start work on the pool on time pushed back the opening date.

"The pool has been difficult to get completed," Project Manager James Slavetskas told the Board Of Education in October 2013.  "Lack of manpower in there was probably one of the biggest items associated with getting that work done.  They just couldn't get those people to come to the site.  In the pool area they had no people working there for seven business days.  That put us behind schedule."

King told school board members Monday that she has asked consulting firm Tetra Tech to come up with pricing for fixing the pool and getting it up and running again.

"There will be a couple of phases going on now," she said.  "As we determine what's gone wrong we can then start to determine what we can do to make this fix really stick this time."

King also said the District is exploring recouping some of those costs legally, but was cautious about predicting whether that will be possible.

"The reality is that the warranties on those materials has passed.  They are generally about a year after the completion of construction, and we are well past that date.  I'm sure our attorneys will have lots of insight for us, and the forensic analysis is going to be critical in our ability to address that from a financial standpoint."

King says more details will be forthcoming, but releasing details at such an early stage before all the facts are in could be detrimental to making progress.

"We'll start working with the Facilities Administration group, which includes members from the Board of Education, to start talking about how we will getting it up and running again," she said.

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