PROGRESS: New Bryant Elementary School will open in August in Sioux City

Construction workers over winter months have dug into interior Bryant tasks and work remains on the original timeline to open in August for the 2019-2020 school year.

Brian Fahrendholz, district director of operations and maintenance, said the $24 million school will be highly usable for students and staff, while it has curb appeal in the neighborhood.

"It has very good architectural appeal to it ... It will be a very nice, landscaped area," Fahrendholz said.

He said as a feeder to North High School, Bryant will have a lot of the blue colors integrated into the design, including the bricking.

There is one other school under construction roughly a dozen blocks away. Hunt Elementary is being built in the 1900 and 2000 blocks of Jackson and Nebraska streets, with a goal to be finished by August 2022, at a cost of $20.5 million. 

In both cases, old schools will be replaced with nearby new buildings bearing the same name. Bryant was located at 821 30th St. and dated to 1890 before it was demolished in summer 2016.

Hunt and Bryant will be funded from the one-cent sales tax for school infrastructure.

There was considerable neighborhood controversy on where the Bryant school should be built. After a new 10-acre spot could not be found, school officials settled on a three-level option at the same spot where the old school was located.

While the new Bryant is being built, the school's students are attending classes in the former Crescent Park Elementary building.

Bryant Elementary will house grades K-5. The size will be 106,950 square feet. It will accommodate up to 625 pupils.

The school board approved a low bid of $17.3 million for the main part of the Bryant work from Hoogendoorn Construction of Canton, South Dakota.

Remaining work includes finishing of interior elements. As the spring moves on, those tasks will move from the classrooms to commons area.

The existing Hunt School, which dates to 1906, is by far the oldest in the city’s public school system.

It will be demolished after students use the building for one last year through May, then for a few years Hunt students will be relocated to Crescent Park. The new school will be built just to the south of the current one.

Fahrendholz said a final design of the roughly 90,000-square-foot building is under way and will  be aired later in the year. School officials decided to keep the Hunt school to two levels and not build a third floor in order to shave the total cost by $2 million.

Recent tasks on the new Hunt grounds include installation of geothermal wells. The third bid package in the Hunt project was unveiled in mid-February for site work such as demolishing the school, plus remaining street and underground utilities reconstruction, Fahrendholz said.

Those elements have an estimated cost of $2.4 million. The school will be demolished this summer after some asbestos is removed and furniture and other equipment are moved out.

A fourth bid package is expected by late 2019 or early 2020 for the main construction of the building.