After sustaining massive, nearly irreparable damage from Super Typhoon Yutu in October 2018, the Hopwood Middle School campus will not be renovated, but will be completely rebuilt from the ground up, in order for the campus to be more resilient. <\/p>\n
Public School System Facilities Development Management director Rachel M. Fusco said the plan is to build a new campus for Hopwood, using the money that it will get from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe final decision for Hopwood is still under review by the board but we will have adequate FEMA funding\u2014approximately $23 million\u2014to build a new facility,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n
When asked for an estimated timeline, Fusco said it might take over four years to build a new, state-of the-art facility to replace the old one. <\/p>\n
\u201cRight now, the proposals have to be generated and the funds also have to be officially released so it\u2019s hard to say but the timeline for generating proposals is 18 months and then we have four years to do the work,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n
Currently, PSS is in the process of identifying possible sites for the new campus. <\/p>\n
\u201cDefinitely, building a new facility is just a matter of where. The site has to be identified first,\u201d Fusco said. <\/p>\n
She mentioned that it is possible to demolish the old campus and build the new facility on the same spot, but that\u2019s still under the discretion of the CNMI Board of Education. <\/p>\n
\u201cRenovation of the old campus is still a possibility if that\u2019s the board\u2019s decision. That\u2019s an option that can be on the table\u2014to demolish what was there and have a new state of art facility in the old location,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n
However, repairs to some of the old Hopwood classrooms are underway to temporarily get students out of the tent classrooms they have been using for the past year. <\/p>\n
\u201cThat was only for the interim, to repair some of the classrooms because it\u2019s going to take a long time for the new campus to be built. Just so the students can move out of the tents,\u201d said Fusco. <\/p>\n
Currently, because of the severity of the damage done to the Hopwood campus, the students are attending classes in military tents built on the Koblerville Elementary School campus. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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