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Hopwood to be rebuilt
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Posted on Jan 10 2020
After sustaining massive, nearly irreparable damage from Super Typhoon Yutu in October 2018, the Hopwood Middle School campus will not be renovated, but will be completely rebuilt from the ground up, in order for the campus to be more resilient.
Public School System Facilities Development Management director Rachel M. Fusco said the plan is to build a new campus for Hopwood, using the money that it will get from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
“The final decision for Hopwood is still under review by the board but we will have adequate FEMA funding—approximately $23 million—to build a new facility,” she said.
When asked for an estimated timeline, Fusco said it might take over four years to build a new, state-of the-art facility to replace the old one.
“Right now, the proposals have to be generated and the funds also have to be officially released so it’s hard to say but the timeline for generating proposals is 18 months and then we have four years to do the work,” she said.
Currently, PSS is in the process of identifying possible sites for the new campus.
“Definitely, building a new facility is just a matter of where. The site has to be identified first,” Fusco said.
She mentioned that it is possible to demolish the old campus and build the new facility on the same spot, but that’s still under the discretion of the CNMI Board of Education.
“Renovation of the old campus is still a possibility if that’s the board’s decision. That’s an option that can be on the table—to demolish what was there and have a new state of art facility in the old location,” she said.
However, repairs to some of the old Hopwood classrooms are underway to temporarily get students out of the tent classrooms they have been using for the past year.
“That was only for the interim, to repair some of the classrooms because it’s going to take a long time for the new campus to be built. Just so the students can move out of the tents,” said Fusco.
Currently, because of the severity of the damage done to the Hopwood campus, the students are attending classes in military tents built on the Koblerville Elementary School campus.
