When Nicolet Union High School’s 1,050 students head back to school on Sept. 3, they’re likely to be very, very pleased with what they find.
That’s because the 18-month construction project to create additional space and revamp existing areas in the building – the oldest part of which dates to the first half of the 1950s, when the Nicolet district was created – will be complete and it will have transformed the building.
The school, 6701 N. Jean Nicolet Rd, in Glendale, serves students from Bayside, Fox Point, Glendale and River Hills. The original portion of the building was designed by modernist Fritz von Grossmann.
The changes are so expansive that it’s nearly impossible to list them all here.
The whole building got air conditioning and other new infrastructure including wiring and plumbing. Many areas got new flooring, ceiling tiles and/or paint, and classrooms got new digital displays and smart boards. There's a solar array on the roof.
A fire suppression system was installed for the first time and security was upgraded, too.
Science labs were renovated and got new cabinets and overhead outlets; the fitness center doubled in size and a former adjacent outdoor space was enclosed to create a multipurpose room (and a roof upon which to install the new air conditioning units); the wood shop was renovated; there are new art studios and new labs for automotive mechanics, robotics, design and engineering programs; a new band room, keyboard lab, recording studio and music practice rooms; the cafeteria was renovated; a school store was added; there’s a new soccer field outside; the gym got new bleachers; there are remodeled locker rooms and a new family locker room for community programs; and a former student commons area in the main entrance which had been converted to offices has been returned to an open space for students.
There’s more, too, because the work literally appears to have touched every space in the building, where all the classrooms are now on the main floor. Former lower level classrooms have been transformed into community recreation programming facilities.
"The best way you could (describe the school before) is it had like a hospital feel," says Nicolet Superintendent Dr. Greg Kabara. "It was just institutional. We wanted to get to something more comfortable, something with flexible seating, comfort level sound."
Fortunately, exposed decorative Lannon stone features have been preserved inside the building as have the many windows that von Grossmann installed to bring the outdoors in. Though it now has one less outdoor space due to the multipurpose room, a number of interior courtyards remain.
“As you go through the building you’ll find basically every room has a window and you have the courtyards all throughout the building,” says Kabara.
“As we went through the redesign and reconstruction, we wanted to get back to Fritz's original concept of entering the nature into the building. So you have a lot of access to outside courtyards throughout the building.”
Everything inside is bright, shiny and new, and very, very blue.
“I used to tell the story, you could stand in the middle of the place, spin yourself around, open your eyes and you wouldn't know what school you're in,” Kabara says. “I said when we're done, I want people to be able to know based on school colors, logos, branding, where you are. You’re in Nicolet.”
The building is attractive, it’s well-equipped, every detail is considered and ... it’s now fully air conditioned (in the past it was just under 25 percent air conditioned and then only in office spaces).
“Learning in a climate controlled environment in September and May is a huge thing,” says Nicolet Principal Joe Patek. “It changes your attitude, changes your effort, your attention.”
The building, which now covers about 360,000 square feet – up by about 30,000 square feet – is, frankly, the kind of facility to which every American high school student should have access.
The work is funded by an April 2022 referendum in which voters approved $77.4 million to renovate the building, which houses one of Wisconsin’s 10 union high schools, which means the school is its own district but receives its students from multiple nearby districts that don’t operate high schools of their own.
“We did a one-time draw on that borrow and invested the money,” says Kabara. “Then really a perfect storm with the market and bond yields (going) high,” allowed the district to use the investment proceeds keep adding more and more to the project while it was already underway.
Private donations have also helped to build on the original investment.
“We’ve had a lot of fundraising,” Kabara adds, “(and are) actually still getting money. We’re going to our rep in Findorff (Construction) and saying, ‘we just got another donation, what can we add?’ As people are seeing the project go (forward), they're getting more interested and they're continuing to add money.”
The renovated locker rooms and new family locker room, as well as the new gym bleachers are examples of features that were not originally planned but have been added as more funds became available.
Some things have also been added due to cost savings achieved during the work. For example, white boards removed from a number of classrooms were repurposed in other classrooms, saving the district in the neighborhood of $15,000 to $20,000 that could be used to pay for something else.
“As we go through the design and construction, (we’re) finding efficiencies, making some reductions, some value engineering and then prioritizing the dollars so that we're hitting all of our wants,” says Kabara. “We created a list of everything that teachers wanted and we just started prioritizing and checking those things off as we went through.
“I think (we now have) pretty much everything on our wish list from teachers. We’re doing as much as we can now.”
Patek says the careful planning for this work should ensure that Nicolet is well-prepared for years to come.
“We took our population projections through the design for the next 10 years to make sure that we are designing every single space with the future in mind,” he says. “With the idea that this is a building that can support the community for decades to come, like it has for the past 70 years.”
Because the project took 18 months to build out – after a nearly year-long design phase – there were workers in the building over two summers and two school years. But administrators and representatives from Findorff, the general contractor, agree that the work went even more smoothly than they could have expected and that disruptions to the learning environment were kept to a minimum.
“We just got aggressive and we stayed in constant communication,” says Kabara. “Things changed day to day. We had to be flexible and it’s really a credit to our teachers for the flexibility of swinging out of a classroom to another classroom one week to the next, teaching there and then coming back to a finished space, and being a part of the process.
“Not only did we accelerate the time, but we accelerated the timeline with millions of dollars of additions to the project. So just adding all that scope and still being on time is unbelievable.”
Christin Mlsna, Findorff’s VP of Marketing and Communications, says that having the contractor involved from the early days of planning for the project helped, as did good communication with the clients.
“Doctor Kabara and Joe were so passionate and so committed to making sure that they were understanding the needs of students, of staff, of employers, of the community, and Findorff had an opportunity to be at the table for those conversations,” she says.
“So the solutions that we were coming up with, we saw that they truly represented what everybody needed and wanted.”
Kabara adds, “talk about uniqueness, tell me a project that got done slightly ahead of schedule, under budget and with additional scope. Think about that.”
What struck me as cool is that a number of alumni have been involved in the project. Signage was designed by a former student who learned his skills in shop class, and another alum was involved in the solar panel installation.
At least one current student helped, too.
This student is participating in a youth apprenticeship program with Findorff and has been working on the renovations.
"Kalandis has worked (in his classes) in the morning and then he'd come in the afternoon, work with Findorff, getting into the trades and earning money during the school day on his school,” says Kabara.
“I think the internship was huge on the job training (and) he felt pretty important around his peers when he was going in places they weren't allowed to be. He was wearing a backpack in the morning and a hard hat in the afternoon.”
Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., where he lived until he was 17, Bobby received his BA-Mass Communications from UWM in 1989 and has lived in Walker's Point, Bay View, Enderis Park, South Milwaukee and on the East Side.
He has published three non-fiction books in Italy – including one about an event in Milwaukee history, which was published in the U.S. in autumn 2010. Four more books, all about Milwaukee, have been published by The History Press.
With his most recent band, The Yell Leaders, Bobby released four LPs and had a songs featured in episodes of TV's "Party of Five" and "Dawson's Creek," and films in Japan, South America and the U.S. The Yell Leaders were named the best unsigned band in their region by VH-1 as part of its Rock Across America 1998 Tour. Most recently, the band contributed tracks to a UK vinyl/CD tribute to the Redskins and collaborated on a track with Italian novelist Enrico Remmert.
He's produced three installments of the "OMCD" series of local music compilations for OnMilwaukee.com and in 2007 produced a CD of Italian music and poetry.
In 2005, he was awarded the City of Asti's (Italy) Journalism Prize for his work focusing on that area. He has also won awards from the Milwaukee Press Club.
He has be heard on 88Nine Radio Milwaukee talking about his "Urban Spelunking" series of stories, in that station's most popular podcast.
