Options campus being hoisted into place

TULALIP When Marysville schools say they are on the move, they arent joking: the first of 121 installments for a new campus hit the road recently and workers will start placing them on foundations as soon as Aug. 22.
The shared options campus is being built just south of Quil Ceda Elementary School and will house up to 700 students from the Tulalip Heritage High School, the 10th Street program and the Marysville Arts & Technology High School.
The $24 million campus is behind schedule and wont be completed until at least next January. The first tenants wont move in until Nov. 17 when the A&T building is scheduled to be finished. After that Heritage could move in by the end of November and a shared gymnasium and cafeteria will open by Dec. 14. The 10th Street program wont move in until after the new year.
The boxes here are the first half-dozen moved to the campus recently, according to project superintendent Kevin Macy of William Scotsman. The Marysville company is building the components at its Smokey Point factory and is completing as much of the interior features as possible to speed assembly on the 40-acre site on the Tulalip Indian Reservation. Macy said most of the cabinets in the modules are already installed, except for where the portable segments connect to each other, Macy added.
The green paint is the same color as the final school, but the assembled building will get another coat and some white trim around the windows, Macy added.
Bingham said the district will host media on the site Aug. 23, after initial crane hoists the day before.
The late campus opening will put an entire class of ninth-graders at Totem Middle School for the beginning of the school year.
The district is also recycling most of the sites former contents, including the trees, roots and all. Timber harvested from the plot was sold and the root balls and stumps were given to Snohomish County for fish habitat restoration projects. That garnered the district more than $30,000 of work for free, according to superintendent Larry Nyland.
Even the huge mound of top soil at the site is being re-used, first for other projects such at the new Grove Street Elementary School; the rest will likely be sold, Nyland added.

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