Community CORE remains committed to Soldier gym work
Five years have passed since the formation of a non-profit group dedicated to making Soldier a stronger community, but its core members remain committed to its flagship project, the restoration of the old Soldier Rural High School gym.
“We thought, here’s this old building that could be used as a community asset, or as a place for kids to play and for families to gather,” Community CORE leader Luke Schreiber said. “It’s kind of a rallying point for working together as a community toward something.”
Since the formation of Community CORE (insert acronym meaning here) the group has also undertaken other projects that benefit northern and western Jackson County — including the Jackson County Bookmobile and a children’s lunch project — but restoring the gym remains a priority.
The group has rallied community members together to clean out the old gym and its surrounding grounds, where Schreiber said “35 to 40 trees” were removed and “four semi-loads of trash and junk and treasures” were taken away. The group has also raised funds to repair the gym’s roof.
“Community CORE was created on the idea that people are created to live in a community, and so the projects we undertake are meant to allow people space to live, work, play and grow,” Schreiber said. “We see this project as something that covers all four of those things.”
The gym building, reportedly built in the 1930s as a WPA project funded by the Roosevelt administration, also housed lunchrooms, storage for a school bus and a coal room, Schreiber said.
“The old coal room still had about six inches of coal in the coal bin,” he said. “We used some of it to fuel a forge this past summer.”
Inside, the gym floor was covered wall-to-wall with junk that had been accumulated over the years by its two previous owners, he said. Volunteers came in and cleaned all of it out.
“We told people, either it’s going in the trash or you can take it home,” Schreiber said. “There were some people who could do anything with old buckets or rusty sinks. We didn’t find anything really amazing, though.”
The group hauled “four or five loads” of scrap metal out of the gym, he said, noting that the money they got for the metal “just barely covered the landfill charge.”
The volunteer group then set out to raise funds to aid the restoration of the building, and through donations and community pancake feeds, the group raised about $20,000 to repair the roof, Schreiber said.
They also worked with Soldier city government to apply for grant funds, and even though their first try to obtain Community Development Block Grant funds for the restoration project was not a success, Schreiber said the group was undeterred in its efforts. Future attempts at getting grants for the project were more successful, he noted.
“We just received word two weeks ago that we received a grant for $5,000,” he said. “That gets us about a third of the way to buying the windows.”
Once the windows are taken care of, Schreiber said the next part of the gym building to be taken care of will be the floors, including replacing the gym subfloor and decking and removing the cement floors in the locker rooms and beneath the stage.
For more information, visit the Community CORE Web site at www.liveworkplaygrow.com
