CLEVELAND, Tenn. – The gymnasium floor at 3-year-old Mayfield Elementary School is too unsafe for small children to be allowed inside, school officials say.
Over the past month, the laminated gym floor has begun rippling, and some of those ripples have turned to ridges several inches high that are breaking apart and leaving gaps.
“We don’t allow the smaller children to come inside the gym,” principal Dee Dee Finison said. “They would want to go over and see the holes and could trip and fall.”
Older children, she said, are allowed to play games around the edges of the gym.
Mayfield opened in 2007, and the floor showed no hint of problems the first two years, officials said.
“It’s definitely a moisture problem but we don’t know the cause,” Gene Bishop, the Cleveland City Schools’ paid construction expert, told members of the city school board’s site committee Wednesday.
School maintenance personnel and staff members have looked for leaks or humidity problems and found none, officials said at the site committee meeting.
The problem could be the school’s location, some committee members said. The area is known for springs and has a lake nearby. When the school first opened, a large sinkhole appeared in the parking lot just outside the gymnasium windows.
An insurance adjuster and a representative from the company that installed the gym floor have been asked to come and inspect it.
“Winter will be coming, and we have to do something about this,” said Murl Dirksen, school board member and chairman of the site committee. “We can’t lag on this.”
In other business, committee members were told that a new heating and air conditioning unit at Stuart Elementary School will cost about $30,000, according to a company estimate. That amount is $65,000 less than the initial estimate.
The new HVAC system is part of an extensive renovation project at the school.
The committee also discussed sign style and placement for the new science wing under construction at Cleveland High School.