By Terri Minteer

Sun Staff Writer

Every year he’s amazed, said Barney Tillery last night, that on the first day of school the kids are waiting on the street, the buses come by, nearly everyone gets where they’re supposed to be, and makes it through the day.

“I consider it amazing this whole operation works,” said the Bremerton school board member.

His words took on more and more significance as, one after another, various people gave reports to the board on the opening of the school year.

The “good news” is that all Bremerton schools opened on time, said Ralph Rohwer, preparing his audience for what was to come.

Rohwer is the top local person with Heery Management Corp., which oversaw the Bremerton schools’ $25 million construction project that turned out a new high school and a new elementary, and remodeled nearly every other building in the district.

There were a few problems, he said.

For one, a transformer blew up at the remodeled middle on Perry Avenue, which is not Olympic View Elementary. Workers still renovating part of the building apparently put too big a load on the power, leaving several rooms of primary student in the dark much of the day. (Half of the OV students are at that school, half at the old OV on Wheaton Way until the project is complete in November.)

At the new West Hills Elementary, some classes overheated. The heating system needs some adjustment.

Rohwer then broke the news to the board about the behind-schedule landscaping at the high school, “an ongoing thorn.”

The landscaping contractor is in financial difficulty, he said; and the general contractor, Merritt Co, is taking over.

And that day, he added, he learned the electrical contractor was having serious financial problems.

Board member Leonard Anderson didn’t react harshly to Rohwer’s report, but praised him, the contractors, and all the school employees for “bending over backwards” to pull everything together for the start of school. “When you look at what we bit off at the beginning of the summer, it’s kind of a miracle we are where we are,” he said.

The came the principals’ reports.

Ernie Feser, now head of the new West Hills, called Wednesday a “wildly spectacular day,” with the power outage at OV, an impromptu fire drill at West Hills, and other minor mishaps adding to the “regular exuberance” of school kids back after summer vacation.

(The fire drill came about, he said, when a child “imbued with scientific curiosity” decide to find out what a certain red handle was for.)

West Hills, the “largest and newest and other adjectives …” of the district elementaries opened with 600 students, said Feser, puffing up with an exaggerated pride that middle school principal Flint Walpole and high school principal Marilee Hansen would later try to outdo.

Feser said the excitement was greater than usual. Maybe, he added, it’s the green grass and shiny building, maybe it’s that there aren’t buckets in the halls (for leaking roofs).

[ top ]

He agreed with Tillery about school openings: “I don’t know how it happens, but it really does.”

Walpole said that the 1,063 students who came to the middle school (the remodeled high school on Wheaton Way), saw it as “different and new and awesome.”

“The old high school does not exist anymore. It’s the new middle school,” he said, stressing that remodeling and repainting have made it bright and clean.

The principal, new to the district this year, shared the surprise that everything went off as well as it did, considering the changes.

For example, the room numbering system was changed so the various wings have letters instead of names. He thought it was logical, and didn’t have any problems with it, but anyone who’d ever been in the building before was entirely confused.

Ms. Hansen, jokingly saying she grew up a “naïve and trusting” farm girl, believed that the new BHS would be finished in July, as she was told. She came back from a vacation in Australia July 18 finding no trees, no grass, no phone …

What followed was a month and a half of watching the construction, answering innumerable questions. “I wouldn’t have missed it for the world,” she said.

Finally, the phones are in and most of the furniture has arrived, but there are still a few details, she said.

“You learn the importance of little things, like wastebaskets,” she said. “We have none.” Six were obtained from somewhere for the cafeteria, but there are none outside the building or in any of the halls.

She managed to put the inconvenience in a bright light, however.

At the old high school, she was always amazed that 45 minutes after school opened, the halls looked like a “pig pen.”

But there wasn’t a scrap of paper in the hall at the end of the first day, she said, alluding to the students’ pride in the new school. She’s not sure she wants wastebaskets, she added.

Finally, Mary Gaebler, director of the district’s new alternative high school program, gave her report.

“There’s no less enthusiasm, no less excitement,” than in other schools, she said.

The kids coming in for interviews to get into the program are coming back after two or three years out of school, she said. Some are gifted, some have learning disabilities, some have been through the court system and want to make a new start, she said.

“Until yesterday, we were a paper product,” she said, but enthusiasm started building when “we really started seeing these live bodies.”

The alternative program is doing its interviews and organizing in the administration building. Its first home, at the OV school on Perry Avenue, should be ready for them late next week. Its real home, in the old Marion School, should be ready for them later this fall.