Best K-12 Education New Brusly High School

Photo by Khrystina Steib

New Brusly High School

Brusly, Lousiana

BEST PROJECT

OWNER: West Baton Rouge Schools

LEAD DESIGN FIRM: Fusion Architects

GENERAL CONTRACTOR: Milton J. Womack Inc. General Contractor

CIVIL ENGINEER: B&A Engineering Services LLC

STRUCTURAL ENGINEER: Wardlaw & Lasseigne LLC

MEP ENGINEER: Salas O’Brien

titleSUBCONTRACTORS: ADP Lemco; Architectural Glass & Metal Co.; All Right Electric Inc.; American Terazzo; AOS Interior Environments; JRE LLC dba Ascension Roofing and Fabrication; ASI Signage; Automatic Access Gates; Beebe’s Pest & Termite Control; Borg Brothers Construction Inc.; Buckelews Food Service; Capital Glass; Cladding & Component Solutions; Cornerstone Commercial Flooring; Crescent Foundations; D & A Associates Inc.; Decorator Depot; Dynamic/California Sports Surfaces; Firestop Integrity LLC; Five-S Group; Insight Inc.; Lanehart Commercial Painting; Levett Mechanical; New Academics LLC; Otis Elevator Co.; Peachtree Protective Covers; Quick Response Fire Supply; R.J. Daigle & Sons Contractors; Safeguard Chemicals; Southeastern Overhead Door; Southern Design Irrigation LLC; Sports Floors Inc.; Superior Performance Surfacing LLC; Superior Steel LLC; TSC; Venable Construction Co.; Watson Electric & HVAC; Wenger Corp.; Young’s Plumbing

Squeezed into a narrow tract of land 1,000 ft from the Mississippi River, the team building the $39-million New Brusly High School faced four hurricanes, 10 months of historically high river levels and a tornado that destroyed their structural steel fabricator’s shop. All of that was before COVID-19 introduced an entirely new set of challenges.

With rising river levels sending veins of underground water through the rear of the site, the team responded quickly with changes to the civil design.

Photo by Khrystina Steib

While building the 124,000-sq-ft high school, the team was tasked with simultaneously converting the existing Brusly campus into a middle school. The contractor operated multiple crews concurrently to finish the work in one summer.

Photo by Khrystina Steib

Through seven-day workweeks and a unique collaborative approach to quickly resequence the schedule, the team regained much of the 183 days lost to weather and delivered the project on time.