FAIRMONT – By the time it’s all done, East Fairmont High School will have undergone a roof-to-floor makeover by the Marion County Board of Education.
Make that, below the floor.
Board members on Monday inked a contract to begin site analysis at the school’s Airport Road campus – in order to correct possible water drainage issues underneath the band room.
McKinley Architecture and Engineering was awarded the nearly $132,000 contract for the work, which will be done in two phases.
The subterranean effort dovetails with the new roof project at East High, which will commence this summer.
Such ground water assessments are common and necessary across the district, Superintendent Donna Heston said, given the lattice-work of coal mines – either working or abandoned – that populate miles-long quadrants beneath soil in the county.
In the 1980s, the gym at North Marion High School near Mannington was condemned while crews dug out a pyritic shale deposit that was causing the basketball court to buckle.
Neighboring Farmington High was lost to mine subsidence altogether in the decade before.
The two-phase work at East High will be paid for with monies from the district’s maintenance fund.
Meanwhile, a quintet of county middle school students are on solid ground – as far as their expertise of West Virginia history is concerned.
Evangaline Moore of Barrackville and Lucas Cox of East Fairmont Middle have joined West Fairmont Middle’s Jaxon Denham, Caroline Riveria and William Fullen as the newest to enter the pantheon as Knights and Ladies of the Golden Horseshoe.
West Virginia’s famed Golden Horseshoe history test, which many say is harder to pass than a coal truck on a two-lane, has been on the books since 1931.
It delves into the full range of Mountain State lore, from the wilderness of its Colonial beginnings to the wildness of its Civil War defiance – to its post World War II coal boom and present-day efforts to make a modern economy.
“This is a rigorous assessment,” Heston said of the test.
