West Shamokin High School students may be getting major upgrades to its athletic field. Architects are doing a feasibility study to create a field house with a home locker room, fitness center, team rooms, offices, and showers. (KP File Photo)
School Directors at the Armstrong School District (ASD) are considering upgrades to the West Shamokin High School athletic field.
According to Sam Kirk, ASD Director of Finance and Operations, IKM Architects have been hired to do a study.
“The architect is going to provide us two different options on two different locations at West Shamokin for $14,992,” he said in a recent interview. “One is on one side of the stadium, and one is on the other side of the stadium. One could incorporate a current maintenance garage into the field house. The scope of the field house will include a home locker room, a fitness center, team rooms, visiting room, coaches office, showers, very similar to what’s up at Armstrong, what they just did. Currently, there’s no field house at West Shamokin; both teams have to change inside the school.”
Kirk said the school has a make-shift fitness center.
“The fitness center is a classroom right now and it’s very, in my opinion, unsafe. It’s small. You get 20, 30 kids in there, that are on top of each other doing a lot of stuff so we’d get the opportunity to move that fitness center out into the field house and then which would open up that classroom for storage and stuff like that.”
Kirk said that he felt it was important that there is equal opportunity for all students of the District.
“I think those kids out there (at West Shamokin) also deserve to have the same type of facilities that the kids in town in here do. Also, there is a safety issue of the current fitness center at West Shamokin. It’s too small. If you go in the hallway, there are a lot of wood-working projects and metal-working projects that are in the hallway. If the fitness center is moved to the field house, the current room could be a storage area to do that. So, there’s some safety issues. We like to treat all of our kids equally throughout the District and there is a need for it also.”