School offices in historic building

An important bit of Sisters history came back to life on Saturday: The school district administrative offices moved into a building that opened in 1939 as the district’s high school.

On a perfect October day under a bright harvest sun, the move was accomplished by a crew of up to 10 people using a 17-foot U-Haul truck. First came dozens of boxed files and papers, followed by computers, desks and other equipment and furniture. The distance was short, about nine blocks, from leased offices the district has been using on the second floor of the Heritage Building at Hood Avenue and Pine Street to the newly remodeled administration building at the corner of Locust Street and what will soon be an extension of E. Cascade Avenue.

The front door faces north, opening onto a parking lot. The address will be 525 E. Cascade Ave.

A cheerful Ted Thonstad, the district’s superintendent, who had just brought the movers a mid-morning box of muffins, told a reporter he thought it was “really great” that the school system had been able to restore this piece of Sisters history. He said the final numbers have not been run but the cost will be about $600,000 or a little over $100 a square foot for the 5,800-square-foot structure plus extensive site preparation. A new building would have cost much more.

The money will come out of the sale of land north of Cascade to the city (for a new city hall) and the county library system (for a new library building, which will open in mid-December).

The former high school building was most recently used as part of the district’s middle school, which moved into another former high school building when the newest high school opened in 2003.

Thonstad said he found it “amazing” to think that the 1939 high school was built with a $14,000 local bond issue supplemented by an $8,000 federal Depression-fighting grant. The building now may be on its way to a place on the National Register of Historic Places (see story, page 5).

One irony of the remodeled structure is that while it is genuinely historic by Sisters standards, it does not fit the false-front 19th century Western architectural theme that governs neighboring commercial structures. Its handsome red brick façade with white window casings could be in Central Maine as easily as Central Oregon.

Inside, the main floor features an eight-foot-wide east-west corridor that runs the length of the building with a variety of office (and possibly classroom) spaces on each side. The floors are carpeted and the walls are painted pale yellow, with stained pine baseboards and picture moldings. In the main hall the baseboards give way to beadboard wainscoting.

Sections of the hall sport original metal lockers, complete with built-in combination locks, numbering 1 through 60. They are the most obvious reminders that this was once indeed a school. They don’t look very historic, though, with their bright orange paint job.

A men’s restroom is at the west end of the hall, a women’s at the east end. There is a small kitchen. And best of all for those who must attend frequently, a large, north-facing room has been set aside for school board meetings and staff conferences, a welcome improvement over the acoustically dead and visually vacuous lecture room in which the board has been meeting in the current high school.

Air in the superinsulated “admin building” will be heated and cooled by a row of four heat pumps that guard the northeast exterior wall. The nearby doorway at the east end of the main hall looks across Locust to the elementary school and its playing fields, which on the morning of the move teemed with pint-sized soccer players.

Although the new building is basically on one level, it contains a partial basement that houses controls for the computer and electrical systems along with four electric furnaces, one connected to each of the outdoor heat-pump sentinels. While compatriots were scurrying about upstairs Saturday, Todd Pilch, the district’s technology coordinator, was down in the basement happily tinkering with his servers and other equipment. He said he does have an upstairs office.

Bob Martin, the district’s facilities director, supervised the remodeling project as well as the move. He said the plan was to complete the move in one day and to have the new offices ready for occupancy and operation Monday.

The plan appeared to succeed. Thonstad and his staff were there Monday morning. And the school board was scheduled to hold its first meeting, mainly a workshop, in the new room Tuesday night.