The former Newberry High School school building is likely to be demolished after years of water damage turned the long-shuttered property into a mold problem so severe that board members said it should not be entered. The Tahquamenon Area Schools Board of Education made that clear at a special meeting Monday, October 26, while stopping short of a final vote on the building’s future.
The reason the issue is moving now is simple: the building has been closed for more than a year, and the district is trying to decide whether any part of it can still be saved before the next step becomes removal. Shawn Tebo said the district may be able to tap state money from the 23E grants, and information on that funding is expected by November 1. If the money is available, it could help cover the work that comes before demolition, including figuring out what to do with records stored in the basement.
Those records matter because they are still inside the building, and officials want to know whether they can be tested for mold and digitized before anything is torn down. Tebo said she will look into that, while Colleen Duflo said she had understood the old high school would be mothballed and left for a future administration to sort out. Jeff Puckett came down firmly on the other side, saying he supports tearing the building down and arguing that the cost to repurpose it would never come back.
The financial question is what makes the demolition talk more than a passing reaction. Puckett’s view was that no one would pay what it would take to turn the building into something usable again, and Tebo said the district may be able to rely on 23E grant funds, though the amount and timing are not yet settled. The board’s own discussion showed the gap between wanting to protect what can still be preserved and accepting that the structure itself may already be beyond saving.
That same meeting also showed how quickly the district is being forced to juggle different needs at once. The board voted to hire Kenn Depew as the new district athletic director after the recent resignation of Dan Hardenbrook, and members agreed he is well qualified for the role and to teach chemistry. Depew already teaches leadership, middle school science and chemistry at TAS, and he has been spending two hours every night preparing chemistry lessons on top of his other classes.
For the building, the next step is not a final verdict but a narrower set of tasks: wait for the 23E funding information, see whether the basement records can be made safe enough to digitize, and then decide whether demolition is the only practical outcome. After Monday’s meeting, that outcome looks increasingly likely, even if the board has not yet made it official.
