Iowa school district’s new cafeteria caters to all grades

With the new baseball field already in use and the new cafeteria well underway, the Wilton Community School District construction project is coming along nicely, officials said.

The full scale of the project also includes an entirely new elementary, attached to the junior/senior high building and sharing the new cafeteria with it, built where the old ball diamond used to be.

The new elementary will be about 65,000 square feet and the new cafeteria measures about 11,000. While the new elementary won't be ready in time for school this year — instead it's scheduled to be done by the 2016-17 school year — the cafeteria will be.

There are a number of benefits to having all grades on one campus, said Wilton Community School District Superintendent Joe Burnett, including sharing amenities, like the three gym spaces the schools will have between them. The elementary gym has windows on the north side to allow for some natural lighting and is large enough to be used for high school activities.

"There was a lot of thought and preparation done by our committee that designed our building and I'm excited to see it come to fruition," Burnett said. "It was truly a team effort on the community's part to make sure we met all of our needs with this bond issue, because we knew these types of projects, they don't happen every couple years, so this should meet our needs for quite a while."

A single campus also lets parents drop off their students all at the same place, no matter what grade they're in, though both schools will have their own entrance.

Once the new one is completed and students moved into it, the old building will be demolished.

The new elementary will boast an elevator placed right inside its entrance, greatly improving accessibility in comparison to the current elementary, which not only has an awkwardly placed elevator, but a second floor that's actually a floor and half. To move along the hallway upstairs in that building, students in wheelchairs must use a lift on those stairs. In the new elementary, the floors will be level, with lower elementary students housed on the lower level and upper elementary students housed on the upper level.

"This'll be much more ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) friendly, which is good; it's the way we should be," Burnett said.

The baseball field is also a point of pride of the project. It has a locker room on the back of the home dugout and the concession stand is now placed between the softball and baseball fields. South of the concession stand, there is a baseball made out of bricks which people can "buy" to have their name placed on. The proceeds from that, after the bricks are paid for, will go toward the baseball and softball teams.