Mid-Pac puts up
boarders in hotelFoundation cracks will force
the school to demolish a dorm
Mid-Pacific Institute moved nearly 50 boarding students to a Waikiki hotel over the weekend and will tear down their dormitory because of structural problems, throwing into doubt plans to open an elementary school on the site next fall.
The Manoa school intended to close the dormitory at the end of the school year, but officials decided to move faster after engineers discovered cracks in structural walls at 50-year-old Wilcox Hall, said Pat Garvey, Mid-Pacific's chief financial officer.
The school will spend roughly $400,000 to house the students in Waikiki and shuttle them to campus until the end of the school year, he said.
Mid-Pacific had planned to renovate Wilcox Hall to house its new elementary school, which will result from the merger of Epiphany Episcopal School and Mid-Pacific in June. But instead the building will be demolished in the next month, and the elementary school may stay another year in Kaimuki.
"The plan is that by June of 2004, we will become one school, although the elementary school may still be housed on this campus," said Edna Hussey, Epiphany's head of school.
Because soil conditions contributed to the deterioration of Wilcox Hall, the school must move carefully in planning new construction, Garvey said. Mid-Pacific discovered cracks in the front of Wilcox Hall before the school year started, and moved boarders to the back of the building, which was deemed safe. But the cracks recently spread to the back, he said.
"It is something we hadn't expected," Garvey said. "This is a problem for everybody involved at the school, especially the boarding students. It's very disruptive."
Until the early 1970s, Mid-Pacific was solely a boarding school, and the school has always had a dormitory on campus. But the number of boarders dropped to 50 this year from 75, partly due to visa problems, and made the dorm financially untenable, Garvey said.
