SpringfieldNewsSun.com

Springfield, Ohio — Amy Fischer walked into her Northwestern Middle School classroom Monday, March 2, and found it filled with steam.

"It was like a jungle," she said.

Just the night before, Fischer had been pleasantly surprised when she and her gifted students met to work on a project that the room was warm, even though it was Sunday night.

By the next morning, it was a different story — one of the galvanized pipes running in tunnels beneath the school's 7th and 8th grade wing had ruptured, leaking the steam it carried to heat the school up into the rooms, said Superintendent Tony Orr.

With the heating system down, students and teachers wore their coats all day to keep warm and classes were held in the gym and other unlikely locations, said Orr.

The school was able to fix the problem, but as the district's building gets closer to 60 years — 10 years past it's intended use, according to architects — the challenges of keeping it running grow greater, he said.

"We can't predict the amount of money it's going to cost each year to repair the building because we don't know what's going to go next," said Orr. "We try to keep up on all the upkeep but it's tough to plug all the holes in a sinking dike."

The ongoing concerns have prompted Northwestern to create an emergency back-up schedule, in case one of its aging buildings would become "inhabitable," Orr said.

If the middle school became unusable as a school, elementary school students would remain on their current schedule, but middle and high school students would move to a split schedule that would have kids in school for the state's legal minimum and disrupt extracurricular activities at the middle school, Orr said.

High school students would attend from 7 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. and middle school would be in session from 12:30 to 6 p.m. in the emergency split schedule, he said.

Northwestern will likely place a combined bond issue and operating income tax on the November ballot to enter into a funding partnership with the state to build new schools. The Ohio Schools Facilities Commission would fund 45 percent of the project to build new schools because all three buildings are over the state's threshold to be eligible for assistance with renovations, said Orr.

In the meantime, Orr said, the district will continue repairing roofing, structural, electrical and plumbing problems, but the costs are growing. One estimate put replacing the middle school's steam pipe heating system at over $1.2 million, he said.

"I do not believe this building is worth spending significant money on," he said. "I'm worried about spending the taxpayer's money on a building that should be abandoned."

Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0373 or mgildow@coxohio.com.