While students take the summer off from school, the Mercer Island School District’s Maintenance and Operations staff works hard to ensure a comfortable learning environment in the upcoming year for students, faculty, administrators and staff. Though it can be difficult to get work done with summer camps, tutoring and other events using the school buildings, the top-notch team works behind the scenes, often out of sight, even during the school year.

“A lot of the maintenance work happens early in the morning,” Maintenance and Operations director Tony Kuhn, a graduate of Mercer Island High School, said. “Work in the classrooms happens before the students get there. And a lot of it is done in the attic, in the electrical rooms, outside on the grounds.”

Yet the difference will be visible in huge ways starting this fall.

At MIHS, the new music wing is still in progress. Workers have not only remodeled the existing property, they have added on 2800 square feet, without changing the parking lot next to it.

“The planning process takes as long, if not longer, than the construction,” Kuhn said. “We had to hire a general contractor, architects and engineers and figure out the design.”

Overall, 80-100 people have worked on the project. The school will have a new room for jazz band and percussion ensemble, an instrument storage room in the hallway instead of classrooms, five new practice rooms, a recording studio and marching uniform storage in the arts hallway. The faculty offices are located in the same area but have also been redone.

“We were so over-crowded, and it was just going to keep getting worse,” MISD choir director Tom Cox said. “It was an impossible situation. Mr. Bixby made sure the administrators saw what it was like trying to squeeze these students in this space.”

At the moment, the orchestra/choir room is packed with instruments and equipment, as it is the only room that has not been remodeled. The improvement will provide a state-of-the-art facility for a large music department, and it is thanks to the levy voters passed in February 2010 for $2.8 million. It will be done by the start of school on Aug. 29, except for some behind-the-scenes work.

“The learning areas of the remodel and addition will be usable by the time school starts,” Kuhn said.

Meanwhile, Lakeridge Elementary, Island Park Elementary and Islander Middle School are getting more space for their students. Each school is receiving one new portable, which will contain two classrooms in one building. Lakeridge’s portable will be on the northwest corner of its sports field, across from the staff lounge. Island Park’s will be in the southwest corner of the small soccer field north of the building. IMS’ will be on the end of the row of existing portables, nearest to S.E. 72nd Street. The main difficulty with portables is connecting them to the schools’ technological systems and removing, then replacing, the fences, which are there for student safety.

Large projects such as these don’t happen every summer, but there is always hard work to be done. The maintenance staff must clean every carpet, scrub and wax every tile floor and refinish and repaint the gym floors. At the high school, the staff has replaced the floor in the main kitchen, put in new wireless Internet ports, replaced the exterior lights and added a new special education room. Next summer, they will face an even larger project: replacing MIHS’ boilers. Liz LeRoy, a construction consultant to the school district, wrote the grant for $464,000, an energy operational cost-saving grant which will help bring down energy bills.

“These existing boilers are reaching the end of their life expectancy,” Kuhn said. “The fact that the grant became available for this helped us make that decision.”

The constant improvements going on in the MISD remind students not to take the Maintenance and Operations staff, the people they don’t see, for granted. None of it happens by magic.

“I can’t say enough about the guys that work for me,” Kuhn said. “I have the best staff. There is so much pride in their buildings, pride in the district. This is a group of guys that doesn’t really get vacation in the summer. That says something about them. The work they do, the hours they work, the shorter summers, and with all of the activities that go on during the summer only makes it tougher for us when you have to work around them. But that’s what we’re here for. The schools are here for the kids.”