The Wright City R-II School Board approved a motion for architects to proceed with updated high school construction plans, with changes to their initial proposal due to rising costs.

The board voted 6-0 in favor of a motion to approve the floor and site plans for the addition of four rooms at East Elementary, a competition baseball and softball field and the new and existing Wright City High School.

A third party cost estimate for the base bid sits at about $51.3 million, a decrease of about $300,000 from last month. The third party cost estimate for the alternates sits at about $14.3 million. This is about the same as last month. The football stadium, performance gymnasium and baseball and softball fields are included in the alternate estimate.

The plan includes utilizing more of the current high school for information technology purposes. With the rising estimates in cost, this was one solution for the district to save funds.

“You take the IT server room that feeds all the district buildings from that main fiber input, we’re going to save some dollars,” Eric Wilson of Bond Architects told the board during a public meeting Aug. 25.

Board member Erin Williams questioned the costs to maintain a larger portion of the current high school than what the district originally intended. She does not want the district to get to a point they are maintaining portions of the building that are old and should not be maintained.

Superintendent Chris Berger said the district’s ideal scenario would be to proceed with partial demolition of the old high school as originally planned. However, this is one way for the district to trim the cost of constructing the new high school.

“I wanted to get it demoed too,” Berger said. “There’s just a reality. That tech space was becoming a booger for us because it had to be a standalone tech hut. And this allows us not to have money poured into the transition of new tech services coming in there.”

The revised plan also calls for the baseball and softball teams to use a shared competition field. The district would also build a practice softball field. Both teams prioritized implementation of field turf over having two separate fields. The district’s initial plan called for each sport to have their own field without field turf.

“Talking to the staff, they would prefer to have a turf infield,” Wilson said. “It basically gives you a ton more playing days. So they’ll play softball and baseball on the same field.”

Berger said baseball coach Ryan Raterman, softball coach Fred Ross and Activities Director David Evans all provided this feedback in favor of the turf field.

“They kind of created the idea,” Berger said. “We kept on kind of kicking the can, but finally dug in to see if it was cost effective.”