Last January, Newton High School acquired approval to redo the Ravenscroft gym floor. With money through capital outlay, funds that the district has in their budget to do major capital improvement projects, the gym floors are being sanded and repainted.

In the original bond that was communicated before Becker’s employment at the high school, the plan was to completely rip out and replace the flooring.

“We had water damage that we had to assess and figure out,” Becker said. “When the companies came in and gave us our quotes and an idea of what we need to do, I learned that this floor could probably be sanded down and refinished another five to ten times and we don’t need to replace it. It’s a lot less expensive to do this than putting a whole new floor in.”

Twenty years of paint and finishing are currently in the process of being removed from the gym floor. Upon finishing this step, the crew will clean the floor, followed by two coats of floor finishing, paint and a top coat. In total, there will be four new layers of flooring.

Not only will the floor be brand new upon completion, but it will include a revised floor design that includes a new center logo, stained three point boundaries, and east to west oriented volleyball courts.

“They [the flooring crew] are going to repaint everything pretty close to the way it was before, but the only difference is the logo at center court. It will be the Newton High School logo on a lot of our stuff. It was already the logo, but it didn’t have the HS underneath,” Becker said. “It will be all black, no gold or yellow so we won’t have to worry about the fading, and it will have that popping effect with the light-colored floor and the black paint.”

Not only does the school save money by redoing the floors instead of replacing them, but by doing such a project now, the school has spent less money than if they were to have done the task during the summer.

Physical education classes have managed to work around the loss of a classroom by participating in tasks that do not require the use of the gym. Such activities include bowling and completing units in the health classroom and outside.

“They’ve kind of been displaced a little bit, but we talked about this ahead of time.They knew it was coming and they were willing to work with us and be flexible with it,” Becker said. 

Additionally, the project in the gym will not affect winter sports as it will have a week to cure before the beginning of practices on Nov. 12.