The end is near for Beckendorf Intermediate School.

The Tomball Independent School District Board of Trustees unanimously voted Sept. 15 to demolish the 30-year old building that has been rife with problems, both structurally and internally the past few years.

The writing was on the wall for Beckendorf when the district announced plans to open a K-6 campus in The Woodlands. District administrators and the board of trustees later decided to relocate Beckendorf’s students to either Tomball Intermediate or the new Creekside Forest Elementary in The Woodlands.

At left, the Tomball ISD Board of Trustees voted unanimously to demolish Beckendorf Intermediate School in order to construct a new transportation annex.

In May of this year, Beckendorf, which opened in 1979, saw its last class of students exit its doorways.

According to Tomball ISD Assistant Superintendent for Ancillary Services David Schuelke, the district had considered utilizing the school as a temporary storage facility.

“We weren’t sure what we were going to use that facility for,” he said. “There wasn’t any real long term plans for it.”

As part of the $198 million bond approved by district voters in 2007, plans are in the works to build an Ancillary Services and Transportation Annex.

Schuelke said the district had also considered renovating Beckendorf Intermediate to in order to utilize the retention pond at the school’s site. The original plan was to build the new facility at the current location of the transportation annex across the street from Beckendorf.

“But it just makes better sense financially to move over to Beckendorf,” he said.

The school has been plagued by structural problems since at least the mid-90s when district officials learned the school had been constructed on the Tomball North fault line.

An engineering study conducted by the district on Beckendforf revealed that portions of the school would move up to 3/8 of an inch per year. The district maintained that the building was safe for its students, but in May 2004, the board voted to tear down a portion of the school that was affected by the shifting.

Portable buildings were brought onto the site to house the students who were forced to leave their classrooms.

In early 2007, Beckendorf Intermediate was at the center of an issue that made local and national headlines when 13-year-old Casey Harmeier pulled a fire alarm resulting in his suspension. Harmeier was arrested and charged with making a “false alarm by report,” a third degree felony.

The charges were eventually dropped, but the case resulted in the passage of House Bill 171, which requires school district administrators to be trained once every three years on proper fire alarm usage and protocol.

Now the district is turning the page on the beleaguered school with plans for a new $8 million facility that is expected to be completed in December 2010.

Schuelke said that the new building will not be built on the existing fault line and that the district has contracted with the original engineering company to provide an updated study on the site’s structural soundness.

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