Contractors are expected to be back at work on the Hineshaw Elementary School site, after Hinesville City Council members approved a change order earlier this month.
The roof was removed in April as part of the start of renovation efforts, but two sections of the school’s outer walls had been bowed out because of the unsupported roof ’s weight.
“We’ve spent the last couple of months meeting with the contractor and structural engineers, trying to figure out how to keep the historic nature of the school and still move forward,” City Manager Ryan Arnold told council members.
Hineshaw was a Rosenwald school, one of many built across the South to educate Black children during segregation. More than 5,000 such schools, funded through businessman and philanthropist Julius Rosenwald, were built in the early 1900s.
Only about 500 remain standing.
City council approved a construction management project last year with Statesboro’s Pope Construction.
But the school, built 96 years ago, was collapsing, architect David Holton said.
“It had started to collapse significantly and those forces were forcing the wall to bow out,” he said. “It was very dangerous to be inside the building.”
A couple of the brick stacks were damaged, just by the roof pulling on them. Those will be replaced. Two other stacks near the front of the building are in better shape and will be kept.
Holton also said there was concern over how long some of the walls would last. The idea is to preserve those walls but use them as a brick veneer.
“The whole roof was bearing weight on those,” Holton said, “which worked great for several decades but as the building started to collapse, these became unstable.”
The plan now is to build a structural wall that will be the inside face of the existing façade. That will require a footing inside, with a 2x6 wall on top of that.
“From the exterior, you won’t know the difference,” Holton said.
The plan also calls for leaving the inside gutted for future use. What function the building will serve in the future has not been determined. The issue with the walls also has given builders a chance to put in insulation, Holton added.
Rebuilding the bowed sections of the walls — which includes removing the wall, cleaning the brick and reinstalling them to be straight — is expected to cost $182,747. Demolition and abatement has cost about $150,000 so far, but the Hineshaw School renovation is a Tier 1 special purpose local option sales tax project, so there is no additional money out of the city’s pockets for the work, Arnold said.
“We’re replicating the roof design and the stacks so it will look like the way it did,” Holton said. “We are replacing the main hallways in there because they were load bearing for the roof framing.”