Demolition of three buildings along Big Bend scheduled to begin in May
BY: JACOB POLITTE
Managing Editor
While the buildings are still unlocked, all offices and classrooms in the Business Administration and Communications South buildings have been fully vacated. During Spring Break, the library building will be vacated as materials are set to be moved into new spaces in the Student Center during the same week.
“The library’s move won’t occur until Spring Break,” Meramec Campus President Feleccia Moore-Davis said. “We’ll be setting up the tutoring, we’ll be setting up the library during Spring Break so that students won’t have a disturbance of service during that time.”
According to Moore-Davis, the demolitions of these buildings are scheduled to begin sometime in May, although she noted that the timetable is subject to change.
“The preparation for demolition will occur in April, and we will probably not see demolition until May,” she said. “The buildings have to be decommissioned first. We still have a lot of equipment and other things in all of those buildings that need to be decommissioned and repurposed to the degree we can repurpose them before they actually can be taken down.”
When asked what decommissioning consists of, Moore-Davis outlined, “The electricity, the water, supplies, things like that. Also, there has to be a level of abatement that goes on prior to the buildings coming down. That work will begin after the library moves [to its new location].”
These projects are a part of massive changes that are already being implemented as a part of STLCC Transformed. The cafeteria and student center has already seen an overhaul, with new classrooms being added and rooms and areas being repurposed for other uses. Some spaces have been walled off to create new rooms, including a massive new room that takes up a sizable portion of what used to be part of the cafeteria atrium. An additional new classroom is also now present near the Veterans Affairs office.
The Social Sciences building is also scheduled to be demolished as a part of Phase 1, but will remain standing for at least two more years so that the campus can have more available campus space.
“We kept the Social Sciences building primarily because we needed the number of classrooms,” Moore-Davis said. “So we couldn’t take down these major buildings without leaving something, or we would have had portable buildings adjacent to the campus. Social Science will come down after the new buildings are erected. Subsequently, those classrooms and offices [currently housed in Social Sciences] have all been planned to be incorporated into the new buildings.”
While Moore-Davis isn’t sure of the exact nature of how demolition will be completed, she expects it to be completed in full by August.
“I’m pretty sure by the time we come back in the fall that the demolition will be complete.”
If students have any questions for Dr. Moore-Davis, she will be available to speak with them at the next “Mocha Monday” from 8:30-10:00am on Feb. 6 in the cafeteria atrium located in the Student Center.
