Mater Dei Building Updates

Mater Dei Building By Andy Morris Updates

We have had a lot of exciting changes to the building this year. Some of these changes were in motion at the beginning of the spring semester, some of these changes are a result of our COVID-19 reopening response.

We would like to give a special thank you to Jarrod Luigs ‘02 for donating the furniture from the 5/3rd building downtown and to Jerry Kirchoff ‘70 and Kenny Miller ‘75 for volunteering their time and talent in much of the construction you see in these pictures.

BOOKSTORE

Two of our classrooms, rooms 214 and 215, were both smaller classrooms in comparison to our other rooms and shared a common wall. We moved the wall back, making classroom 215 larger and repurposed 214 as the bookstore, which is closer to the media center. We were able to move the bookshelves constructed by Kenny Miller to the new bookstore.

TEACHER LOUNGE

The teacher lounge was in need of a remodel. With moving the copiers out of the break room, we were able to create a dining space for our staff, separate from a workroom.

From IT Office to New Teacher Workroom The IT office relocated downstairs in freshman hallway to a smaller space. This gave us the opportunity to move the copiers out of the break room and into the space, creating a dedicated workroom for our teachers.

The former bookkeeper’s office was being used for storage and also acted as the bookstore. We removed a wall that separated the room, put up drywall (thank you again to Jerry and Kenny,) new flooring and painted the room in red and gold. The furniture was donated by Jarrod Luigs. We have named our new conference room the Red and Gold room. RED AND GOLD ROOM

LED Lights In January we took advantage of a rebate through Vectren to retrofit all of our light fixtures to LED. The annual estimated savings per the Vectren analysis is approximately $22,000. We have seen a savings in our energy costs and will continue to track over the next year.

Since inception of the Bring Your Own Device policy in 2018 and every student having a laptop or Chromebook, we were able to decommission some of our old computer labs. We repurposed room 213 as a classroom.

NEW CLASSROOM

iWave air filtration Through the support of donations from Koch Air and Schiff Air Conditioning & Heating, we installed air purifiers throughout the entire building. This system uses ionization technology to remove bacteria, allergens and viruses from the air, including studies where it has proven to remove the coronavirus. This system helps us today in our COVID response. In the long-term, it will help keep our students and staff healthy throughout the school year.

WEB CAMERAS We have been very successful in operating the school day in a pandemic environment while keeping all of our students and staff members safe. This however doesn’t mean that we have not had students go into quarantine because of being a close contact or having the virus. To help students not fall behind, we bought HD Webcams for every teacher so that students could use ZOOM to connect with the classroom while they are at home on quarantine.