Grand
Meadow, Minnesota--
Year 2001 update
by Freda Parker
It's not often that a school district gets plan approval and a grant from its state legislature for twice the money the school district asks for. But Grand Meadow, Minnesota ISD #495 did! On September 15, 1998 Grand Meadow voters passed a bond for $8 million for a much needed Kindergarten through Grade 12 facility.
"But," said Superintendent Bruce Klaehn, "the $8 million was contingent on a minimum $1.5 million grant that we had to get from our legislature. We got $3 million."
For its 400 students and 30 teachers, Grand Meadow's approved plan calls for five Monolithic Domes -- 81,000 square feet for classrooms, media center, gymnasium, cafeteria and multipurpose center with a stage.
Klaehn feels that the Monolithic Dome concept, their research and their efforts to inform the public helped secure approval and funding from the legislature. He said, "We started researching and planned on this (Monolithic Dome) approach before we passed the bond issue. In May 1998 we traveled to Arizona twice with Rick Crandall (MDI architect) and met with the superintendent at Payson and at Whiteriver."
Three factors led to the initial choice for Monolithic Domes: lower construction costs, lower operating costs and increased safety. Klaehn said, "We passed that information on to our board and task force, and we held public meetings. Then Crandall came here for a press conference in August, and he did a feasibility study, so we were able to present that to our committee."
Asked if he thought the feasibility study was helpful and worth the money, Klaehn replied, "Yes, it was. I don't think there was any way we could have just verbally communicated to our public that yeah, this was a good idea. And I think we ourselves needed to see how the school would actually lay out. The feasibility study showed us how many domes there would be, how big they would be, and how they would relate to one another. Without that study, I don't think we could have had a concept in our minds of what it would look like."
Telling people how well Monolithic Domes served as disaster shelters stimulated more interest. Klaehn said, "It's interesting because just a couple of years ago in Minnesota we had several towns hit by a tornado and schools destroyed. So a strong selling point was: This will be the safest building for your children to be in. We'll be in a community where school is the building you want your children in, not where you want to get them out of."
Support from their architects also helped. Klaehn said, "When our architects first heard about it, Bill Meschke was immediately interested and supportive."
Meschke is a company director and head of the architectural department at TSP One, Inc. of Rochester, Minnesota. As part of TSP Group, Inc., TSP One, established in 1969, is a full service architectural, engineering and planning firm.
Meschke said, "We've been talking with Rick Crandall about Grand Meadow for a couple of years now and we're very excited. We worked on the Sports Center at Park University so we're familiar with Monolithic Domes (Roundup, Spring/Summer 1999, p. 14; this issue, p. 30).
"We know the pros and cons," Meschke continued. He said that in the Grand Meadow project, some people want windows in the domes so that's a weak kind of con. To solve it, Meschke is meeting with the district to see if their budget will allow windows. "Possibly, we'll be able to put them in the elementary school dome. But actually many schools these days are constructing windowless classrooms," Meschke said.
As for pros, TSP One's engineering and structural departments researched Monolithic Domes. "Based on their findings, we're recommending that Grand Meadow go with geothermal heating and cooling," Meschke said. "The superior insulation of these structures makes that possible."
For their constuction management, Grand Meadow selected E&V Consultants and Construction Management, Minneapolis. Although Grand Meadow will be his first Monolithic Dome project, Randall Lutz, senior project manager at E&V, said he is familiar with the concept and has visited several dome facilities already in operation. "It should be a very interesting and intriguing project," Lutz said. "Domes have been around for centuries. But there's an apparent economy with today's designs that make them (domes) competitive with conventional construction. Heretofore, domes have been a fairly expensive proposition and therefore not a system of choice, primarily because of economics. Now they can compete against conventional construction in certain applications."
Grand Meadow has scheduled ground breaking for October. "That's really got everyone excited," Klaehn said. "The students are very excited. They feel like they're in on a ground floor, a cutting-edge event. The staff is accepting with some reservations. We've taken some staff members down to the dome school in Pattonsburg, Missouri, so they could see what the domes were like. We weren't necessarily pleased with the room layout, so we took notes and made the changes we wanted."
As for the community as a whole, Klaehn said that most people echo the excitement of the students, but "there are some who are in the field of construction who hesitate because it's new. You hear a lot of questions like: what if it falls down, what if it doesn't work, what if ". So some of the hesitancy is because of domes, but some is because they just didn't want a new school anyway.
"I think our greatest challenge has been making folks understand that this is clearly a better way to build," Klaehn said. "I think it's just a matter of letting them see how well they're built."
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