Luxemburg-Casco school highlights new gym, wrestling room, tech ed equipment

LUXEMBURG - The new, 1,450-seat gymnasium at Luxemburg-Casco High School is open. So, too, are the new wrestling room and new locker rooms.

The public got to see them firsthand during a dedication ceremony and open house Jan. 26 at the school, and the gym hosted its first athletic event Tuesday night: girls JV and varsity basketball games against Clintonville.

The new facilities were finished in the approximate middle of the timeline for a $27.8 million renovation project for the Luxemburg-Casco School District, funded by two referendums passed in April 2018. Work on these projects, along with other projects in the high, intermediate and primary schools, started last May.

But while the gym held the spotlight during the dedication, Luxemburg-Casco District Superintendent Glenn Schlender highlighted other improvements at the campus in a Monday meeting with the Star-News.

The gym perhaps comprises the most visible component of the overall renovation, alongside the upcoming move of the district's middle school from its building in Casco to the Luxemburg campus. Schlender said reaction from those checking out the gym and wrestling room at the ceremony was, for the most part, beyond positive.

"People were tickled to death. They were thrilled," Schlender said. "(They said) 'Finally, we've been waiting for this for such a long time,' that kind of sentiment. They were impressed and thrilled with what they saw."

The gym houses three full basketball courts — the old gym held one and a half — which can be screened from each other, as well as expanded seating. Several sets of bleachers sit on bases that can inflate to make them easier to move to the ends of the court and create what Schlender called an arena setting for basketball games.

Wrestling matches also will be held in the gym, and it's equipped with hoists in the ceiling that will hold the mats until they need to be lowered to the floor for meets and tournaments. Besides volleyball matches, it also can play host to badminton, pickleball and practices for certain track events, including the pole vault.

The wrestling room has five mats for practice; the former room in the high school had two mats with two more at the middle school. With the change, the middle school wrestlers practice in the same location as the high school students. Coach Chas Treml said this creates continuity as younger wrestlers develop within the program, which has earned 12 WIAA team championships.

"We can kind of shift around because of the weight (classes for wrestlers), the caliber of the kids, so they can continue learning," Treml said. "Our coaching staff can get to know the younger guys. The end goal has always been ... to grow the connections between coaches and younger students."

The room also was built with cushioned floors under the mats, what Schlender called "concussion floors," to help keep wrestlers safer. The cost of those floors — about $30,000 — was not funded not by the referendum, rather money came from the wrestling booster club.

Other changes, upgrades

Schlender also pointed out changes in the technical education rooms for the high and middle schools. The rooms aren't scheduled to be finished until the end of the school year, but new machinery has replaced the outdated equipment in the metal fabrication shop, including CNC (computer numeric control) and cutting machines.

The metal shop also demonstrates a type of community partnership, which Schlender said the school hopes to cultivate with others. Local fabrication shop D&S Machine Services gave tooling equipment and cutting fluid to the school, while seven students were placed at D&S to not only work for pay but earn school credit for the experience.

Schlender said another partnership is coming into the new auto shop with Northeast Wisconsin Technical College, which will supply a teacher to work with Luxemburg-Casco and Kewaunee students who can earn a one-year technical diploma in auto shop maintenance from NWTC. He hopes to institute a similar diploma program with the college in diesel mechanics at the Casco building, which also will house the district's planned alternative school.

"Going back to that community engagement event in 2015, the first thing (requested) was upgrading the facilities," Schlender said. "The second was tech ed and forming partnerships."

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Among the remaining projects is remodeling the current wrestling room into a fitness center that will be open to the public. Three high school classrooms next to the gym will become multi-use rooms that could be used by the public, and the new middle school is scheduled for completion by the start of the 2020-21 year.

Schlender said the large turnout and reactions he heard at the gym dedication told him the district is doing the right thing for the students and parents.

"The real story here is, we now have a much stronger relationship with the community because we listened to their hopes and dreams," he said. "There's enormous passion in this community not just for athletics but for academics. The passion we see from the kids and the parents is exciting."

Contact Christopher Clough at 920-741-7952, 920-562-8900 or cclough@doorcountyadvocate.com.

This article originally appeared on Green Bay Press-Gazette: Luxemburg-Casco school highlights new gym, wrestling room, tech ed equipment