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More than a year after Del Norte High School began its tiny house program, students will have a workshop to keep themselves and their project out of the elements.

The Del Norte Unified School District Board of Directors on Thursday authorized the use of $152,698 in voter-approved general obligation bond dollars to pay for part of the workshop’s construction.

The tiny house workshop, a weld and wood shop for the high school are three projects the district is paying for using $693,000 in state Career Technical Education Facility Grant Program Dollars, according to School Facilities Consultant Vice President Matt Pettler.

The tiny house workshop will be roughly 30 feet wide by 50 feet long with a 19-foot overhang. A 14-foot tall roll-up door will allow the tiny house to roll into and out of the building, DNUSD Director of Facilities and Maintenance Steve Morgan told trustees.

“That building is slated to go into what’s currently an old green house (near) the band and media arts building,” Morgan said.

DNHS’s building and construction trades instructor, Don Hartley, began the tiny house program in the 2018-19 school year. Hartley, whose previous classes had built a single-family home at Glenn Street and Reddy Avenue, wanted to walk his students to experience the entire process of building a home from the design through the installation of the electrical and plumbing systems in one year rather than multiple years, DNUSD Superintendent Jeff Harris told trustees.

Proceeds from the sale of the tiny house would go back into the program for the following year’s project, according to Assistant Superintendent of Business Jeff Napier. The Board of Trustees had already approved the sale of the program’s first home, he said.

On Thursday, Morgan told trustees that he and former DNHS Principal Randy Fugate had been trying to determine where students could build a tiny house in the winter since students couldn’t be out in the rain.

“We looked at the weld shop, it’s not tall enough,” Morgan said, adding that the tiny house itself is 8.5 feet wide by 22 feet long — 28 feet if you include the trailer — and about 13 feet tall. “We looked at the band awning, it wasn’t tall enough or spacious enough. There just wasn’t any place we could find. The whole CTE funding (idea) from the very start was to build a shop building to build a tiny house in so the students would be out of the rain, cold and wind.”

Harris said the district had applied for Career Technical Education Grant Program dollars for the automotive, media, welding and wood shop classes at the high school. It received grants for the weld shop and building construction trades programs. This includes a 50 percent reimbursement in the amount of $183,311 for the weld shop and a total of $510,136 for the Building Construction Trades facility, which consists of the wood and tiny house shops.

The state would reimburse the district $137,068, or 50 percent, the cost of the wood shop structure, which has already been finished. State CTE facilities dollars would pay for 50 percent, or $373,068, for the tiny house workshop, according to Morgan’s staff report.

If the district does not move forward with the tiny house workshop, it will lose the full $510,136 for the Building Construction Trades grant, according to Morgan.

The project is budgeted at $846,136, Pettler said. About $100,000 of that will be used as a contingency fund, he said.

According to Pettler, the $152,698 the Board of Trustees was asked to approve on Thursday comes state facility hardship reimbursement to the district’s general obligation bond fund for a fire alarm replacement project.

The Board of Trustees could choose to have those dollars either go through the general obligation bond fund or have it directly pay for the tiny house workshop as a high-priority capital outlay project, Pettler said.

According to Morgan, the tiny house workshop project would go through a formal bid process with the district selecting the lowest responsive bidder to be the contractor.

In other matters, the school board approved allocating $500,000 in general obligation bond funds to complete an HVAC replacement project. According to Morgan, the district had already spent $1.25 million in GO Bond money to replace units at Pine Grove, Redwood and Smith River schools.

The additional money would replace five units at Mary Peacock Elementary School, eight at Bess Maxwell Elementary School, 13 on portable classrooms at various campuses and 4 heaters at Margaret Keating Elementary School in Klamath.

Morgan said the project stems from work orders he had been receiving from teachers and principals at Mary Peacock, Bess Maxwell and Pine Grove that HVAC units were failing. The units at Mary Peacock were about 27 years old, when they only last about 15-20 years, he said.

A custodian at Margaret Keating alerted Morgan to the failing heaters at the Klamath K-6 school. Morgan said the original heater was from 1962.

Earlier in the Board’s Thursday meeting, Sarah Mitchell, vice president of the CSEA Great Northern 178, the union that represents DNUSD classified staff, brought up concerns about the district’s annex building down the street from its offices on Washington Boulevard.

According to Mitchell, teachers at the building, which houses many of the district’s special education students, have complained about heaters not working for several years. Teachers in that building also complained about rodents infesting their classrooms, Mitchell said.

“I think construction and the trades and teaching our kids in this community, that is something we have to do, but when we have special education students in wheelchairs in buildings that haven’t had heat for years, that have electrical uses and other things, ethically we’re looking at the question if we’re going to high prioritize this,” Mitchell said, questioning the proposed designation of the tiny house workshop as a high priority project. “We’ve got to put our money where our mouth is. When we’ve got special education students in freezing cold buildings with rodent problems, we’ve got to look at our priorities.”

Trustee Area 4 representative Charlaine Mazzei brought Mitchell’s concerns up with Morgan, who said he too was concerned about it.

“However it’s not in any worse condition than the rest of these,” Morgan said, referring to the list of schools that are higher on the priority list when it comes to HVAC replacement.

According to Morgan, teachers at the annex building have been using space heaters to keep their classrooms warm.

“They have heat and they will have heat and these things can’t be done overnight,” he said. “We’ve put priority to it and it will be done.”

According to Morgan, DNUSD campuses are in need of repairs to the tune of about $300 million.

Del Norte voters approved Measure A, DNUSD's $25 million GO Bond, in 2008.

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