A groundbreaking ceremony took place last week to mark the start of the first phase of a major expansion project at Columbia High School.

Work over the summer will focus on preparations for the actual construction set to take place through at least part of the 2024-25 school year.

During this time, the primary entrance for the school will be moved to the back of the building.

The first of three phases will see some major additions to the school, primarily a number of classrooms as well as some new administrative spaces.

As Columbia School Board President Greg Meyer explained, this first part of the project will also add an auditorium to the school – a beneficial addition given the long reliance on using space at Columbia Middle School for performances.

“The big one there is the auditorium,” Meyer said. “We’re gonna have a wonderful new auditorium, because, amazingly enough, a high school of our size does not have an auditorium. Any performances or anything have to go to the middle school which has the cafetorium, which is not built for that.”

The second phase of the project, to begin at a later date, will similarly be a big addition as a new gym is built at CHS.

“The second part is gonna be a competition gym, so we’ll be able to host tournaments and that sort of thing,” Meyer said.

Rounding out the project, the existing part of the school will undergo various renovations in order to keep in line with the new parts of the building and generally provide some much needed upgrades.

“If we’re gonna double the size of the high school, we need a bigger cafeteria, we need more storage space for food, we need more prep area, we need more bathrooms, on and on and on,” Meyer said.

As a sort of precursor to these additions and renovations, the high school also saw changes to parking with an expansion into nearby Bolm-Schuhkraft Memorial City Park this past spring.

Discussion and work toward the project largely began in 2022, with the school board working with FGM Architects to gather feedback and information from faculty and staff on future needs of the school in the fall of that year.

In early 2023, Columbia Superintendent of Schools Chris Grode spoke with the Republic-Times to provide an overview of the project and why it’s necessary for the community.

Grode then spoke to the need for both an auditorium and new gym at CHS, as well as the requests from staff and faculty for additional space, citing particular struggles among Home Ec classes cooking and sewing in the same space.

He also noted at the time that the idea of constructing a new high school on the district’s land just north of Columbia – partially in St. Clair County – was briefly floated and discarded.

Meyer, who is part of the board committee primarily overseeing the project alongside board member Adam Hemken, said recently that the school board ultimately decided on these ongoing efforts as it weighed the potential cost to the community.

“We looked at a bunch of options,” Meyer said. “We studied this for a good year or two before we moved in this direction. We looked at building an entire new high school, we looked at renovations and that sort of thing. The problem is, we just couldn’t build again without raising taxes, so that was our main goal is to keep our tax base neutral. People are paying too much already, and we don’t want to burden them any further. This was the most economical way for us to accommodate the future growth of the high school and save some money and not increase taxes.”

Grode recently said the board is intending to keep the cost of the entire CHS project under $40 million, and Meyer said similarly, both of them noting the school district should be able to pay for the project while keeping the tax rate flat for the community.