Education

Recently, the Los Alamos Public School Board of Education made a land swap between the county and the district official.

The board officially passed a resolution finalizing the swap Sept. 11. Three years ago, when Diamond Drive was being renovated, the county and LAPS decided to do a land swap that they would both benefit from.

LAPS needed a section of land near Diamond Drive and Canyon Road that would allow them to expand and renovate Mesa Field, and the county needed a section of land near Orange and Diamond Drive to install a right-of-way.

“The county’s bus stop was on school land, our retaining wall (Mesa Field) was on county land, and all we wanted to do was remedy that,” LAPS Assets Manager Joan Ahlers said.

One of the district’s primary motivations for the swap was that land ownership issues were clashing with the school’s policies designed to protect students.

Usually, if someone walks into a crowded room and says loudly “we’ve got gas,” the crowd is going to quickly get away from that person.

But since it was open house night at the Los Alamos Middle School and the person doing the shouting was Los Alamos Public Schools Superintendent Dr. Gene Schmidt, the crowd cheered.

Ever since a main gas line broke at the middle school a couple of weeks ago, people were wondering if the school was going to have heated classrooms and hot food for students when winter came.

According to Schmidt, the leak was isolated Tuesday and repairs began immediately. The leak was somewhere in a thousand-foot stretch of the gas line that runs alongside the temporary classrooms.

“We found the actual leak along that section of pipe,” Schmidt said. “By this Tuesday, the students will be having hot lunch.” The middle school cafeteria also provides hot lunches to all the elementary schools, as well.

The middle school’s troubles started about two weeks ago when a subcontractor working for McCarthy Construction, the contractor in charge of renovating the school, struck a gas line with a backhoe. After doing a number of pressure tests using air to find the leak, the company found leaks in other areas of the network.

The Los Alamos School Board voted Thursday to have a construction firm tear up all the old sections of a gas line currently underneath the middle school campus.

The gas line, which is about 1,000-feet long and runs from the northern end of the middle school campus to the southern end, had been threatening the $18 million construction project since Monday when construction crews accidentally ruptured the line. Though no gas has run through the line since Monday, air pressure tests on the line have revealed multiple leaks.

“It was very easy to build consensus on this,” Los Alamos Public Schools Board President Kevin Honnell said. “When you find something that’s already a problem and it’s only going to get worse over time, now is the time to fix it. After all, you’re building an entirely new school.”

Board member Melanie McKinley, who represents White Rock, said it just makes sense to her.

“I was confused as to why they didn’t replace this entire aging infrastructure when they first started construction,” McKinley said. “To me, it seemed an easy decision to make. When you’re in there doing all this work, you replace all of it.”

It’s estimated the cost to replace all the existing lines will be about $20,000.

For all those aspiring musicians out there in the Los Alamos Public Schools system, the school board has some good news and some bad news.

The bad news is, it recently voted to raise the rental fees for school instruments by $20, making the price $100 to rent an instrument from the district per school year and $50 for the summer. Percussionists, who never had to pay a rental fee, will now have to pay $20 a year for the privilege.

The good news is the rental rates haven’t been raised since the 80s, and the $20 hike should be more than adequate to take care of repairs for quite a while.

“We decided on $20 because it was a nice round number that would be adequate for repair and maintenance of the instruments,” said Kim Lettellier, the school system’s music staff team leader. “This should prevent us from having to nickel and dime parents every year.”

During an interview with the school board, Lettellier also noted that $100 a year is still quite a bargain.

“To rent a violin some place else, it would cost students about $15 a month. That’s a basic fee, anywhere you go,” she said. “ … It is quite a service we are providing to the community.”