Longtime LR Firms Team Up On New Showpiece High School

Photos by Lori Sparkman

It is a cloudy start to the workweek in west Little Rock. Cars buzz along Arkansas 10 back and forth, many of them pulling into work parking lots in The Ranch neighborhood, home to sprawling corporate headquarters, a call center and myriad small businesses of every description. Down one street, the scenery turns immediately more pastoral thanks to greenspace tucked behind the commercial activity, and beyond that, upper-class neighborhoods unfold along picturesque streets.

It is an altogether serene slice of the city, a self-contained ecosystem where professionals raise their families with every known convenience within arm’s reach. All that was missing, as residents and their government representatives had said for years, were pieces of the public school system to dovetail with Don R. Roberts Elementary, closing the loop from kindergarten through high school graduation.

Well, no more. In 2017, the area celebrated the opening of Pinnacle View Middle School, which has quickly risen to be among the best in the state. Public School Review compiled performance rankings from the National Center for Education Statistics and the Arkansas Department of Education that showed PVMS’s diverse student population — 63 percent minority enrollment — ranked in the top 20 percent of all Arkansas schools in reading and science and top 30 percent in overall testing proficiency.

Now a soaring high school is under construction directly adjacent to the award-winning middle school that, if facilities have any bearing on student performance, will continue that trend of excellence and achievement.

Bobby Gosser does not teach algebra or coach baseball or run students through their paces at the metal shop, but right now, he is as instrumental to the life of the school as anyone who does. The president and CEO of Little Rock-based Baldwin & Shell Construction Co., Gosser has spent a lot of time out there, first as the company built the middle school and now as the gigantic high school starts to take shape.

Baldwin & Shell Little Rock headquarters. Photo by Lori Sparkman

“For us, a larger project really becomes easier because there’s more time for planning,” he said. “You typically can get the best of the best subcontractors because they’re wanting to work on that big project. If you’ve got adverse weather, you’ve got more time to overcome it. We did plan adverse weather days in our schedule here, and so far, that hasn’t been a problem, but weather delays are programmed in. On a smaller project, you don’t necessarily have that luxury.”

Baldwin & Shell has had a 50-plus year relationship with the Little Rock School District. Photo by Lori Sparkman

Being at the heart of the largest K-12 project in the state right now does not faze Gosser much — not because he does not take seriously the million moving parts or understand that challenges lie around every corner but because the company has been there before and more than once over nearly 80 years in business. Locally, Baldwin & Shell has had a 50-plus-year relationship with the Little Rock School District, and the company’s reputation has led it to projects statewide. A company does not achieve that without being darn good at what it does.

Bobby Gosser, Baldwin & Shell. Photo by Lori Sparkman

“We’re very cognizant of the fact that how we get the next job depends on how well we do on the current one,” Gosser said. “That’s proven itself over time and made us very successful with most every district we’ve worked for, and that’s up to over 50 districts in the state. Administrations change, facilities people change, superintendents change, and we’re still there. It’s like our tagline says: building relationships. That means everything to us.”

The construction company is joined on the PVHS project by Lewis Architects Engineers in Little Rock, another longtimer in K-12 education projects. The two companies are no strangers to one another, having had a working relationship on various projects that spans decades.

“We were reminiscing a little bit about our companies,” said John McMorran, vice president of Lewis Architects Engineers. “[Former Baldwin & Shell president] Bob Shell and [Lewis founder] Merle Lewis were doing this a long, long time ago. They built a relationship between the two companies that Bobby and I have been able to really keep moving forward. As both our companies have changed, that relationship has always been a common thread through the years. Matter of fact, my first project out of school was with Baldwin & Shell.”

John McMorran,
Lewis Architects Engineers

“And one of my first projects out of school was with Lewis,” Gosser chimed in.

Even with all of that project history and track record, the two companies mince no words when describing the challenges the new high school has provided. Previous projects may lend similarity of experience, but no two projects are exactly alike, and at 320,000 square feet, PVHS’ massive footprint required the utmost care in design both inside and out.

“We’re building this on the side of a hill,” said Randy Wolf, principal at Lewis. “With this site, just in the building’s footprint, there’s 30 feet of elevation change. Across the entire site is almost 60 feet of elevation change that we had to deal with.”

Randy Wolf, Lewis Architects Engineers

“Also on this particular site, you had an existing building, and you had an existing football field that was already there and a big parking lot in between,” McMorran added. “We had to figure out how can we connect them? Is it all pedestrian, or do we have to allow vehicles through there? The consideration of the surrounding properties, which includes a large pond in the back, so you’ve got to deal with water drainage, makes it pretty tight to build on.”

In the job superintendent’s trailer, floor-to-ceiling sized sheets of paper are posted on the wall, detailing a dizzying number of construction details and scheduling in agate type. Logistics plays a huge role in the efficiency and quality of such a build, giving between 170 and 200 workers on any given day the materials they need to keep busy without excess building components spending time on the pallet. It is an exercise in just-in-time planning and execution that will be repeated day after day for almost four years.

“How we move that needle forward is through constant checking of lists to make sure that we’re getting stuff when and where we need it on time,” Gosser said. “You know, the worst thing you can have is the materials are not in the building, or you have men here, and the materials aren’t here, so not only do we have a construction schedule, but we have a procurement schedule that tails into it.

“We know when the workforce needs to put something in, and so months before that happens, we’re procuring things and getting them on-site when it’s time to put it in. We don’t want to get it in too early to jack up a site full of stuff you don’t need for a year. Technology helps organize that.”

In fact, technology abounds at every phase of the project, from how plans are created and communicated to using drones to manage logistics and capture progress. Such is the reality of today’s design and construction industries, but as Gosser pointed out, the most important elements of getting such projects done are still decidedly analog.

“One of the things that we do is our daily huddles where the superintendent will go out, he brings every craft foreman in, and he talks to them face to face,” Gosser said. “OK, how many men you got here today? What are you working on? What’s your goal to get accomplished? We track that so that we can help keep everybody accountable other than just by email. We’re back to the boots on the ground, the blocking and tackling of, ‘Hey, pick up the phone. We got a problem. Let’s talk about it, try to get it checked off the list and move on to the next one.’

“That also goes for the owner; every other week we meet out here with the owner representative and the architect. We’re going through a whole list of things where there’s probably a hundred and something items on there, and we walk the site.”

When finished, Pinnacle View High School will accommodate 1,200 students, as well as the many teachers, coaches, administrators and support staff needed to manage a typical school day. Wolf described designing the interior of such a structure almost as if planning a small city, and the comparison is not that far off. Classrooms are just the tip of the iceberg of the project, which will also boast foodservice, athletic facilities, fine arts, science labs, auto and metal shops, a physical plant, safe rooms, and common areas, all demanding sufficient power and digital backbone to support classroom and personal technology.

“State funding comes with a list of state requirements,” he said. “What we didn’t have 10 years ago was mandated space sizes, and that could be size of classroom, number of bathrooms — all those different types of requirements you have to meet.

“The real challenges of a school this big is making sure you can get that amount of people to transverse the building, to be able to get through it in a timely manner, changing classes. How do you feed that many people at one time? How do you design spaces to handle that quantity of occupants or build separations and things where you can break the building up if something was to happen? All those are challenges that happen when you get to something of this size.”

Discussing the scope of the project, the largest in Lewis Architects Engineering’s long history, McMorran’s tone is tinged with pride. Not only did landing the account and designing the space require all hands on deck, but the company’s building was damaged by the Little Rock tornado, forcing work to be done off-site. Now, as the building is taking shape, its striking black-brick-and-glass profile jutting its chin skyward, he is energized by what he and his fellow professionals have pulled off.

“Schools operate differently than they used to,” McMorran said. “The mindset of schools has gone from academic achievement to more tailored learning for individual students. What that means is you’ve got breakout spaces, and outdoor spaces came into play during COVID-19. What we’ve also seen is this kind of shift from square classrooms all lined up to having a few classrooms kind of bunched together, and then you have some breakout spaces where you can get three or four students into this area, and the teacher can still see them and interact that way.

“It’s all very interesting to watch, and I’m curious to see where this all goes moving forward. Schools today, I mean, they’re not the way they were when I grew up and not the way my older kids grew up in school, but my younger kids are getting to experience some of that. It’s a new way of doing it, and I think it’s going to be great for society, and it’s going to be great for the younger generation.”

Given the last word by which to sum up the $147 million project, Gosser boiled it down to the most salient facts — the build is on time headed for its March 2027 opening, and the company is meeting its goal of zero lost-time accidents. Elements more important than that are hard to come by in his business, but the quality of the working relationships is a nice bonus.

“This has been a good client to work for,” he said, “good design team, everybody’s working well together. It’s a great place to come to work. We can’t always say that about every job we have going on. They all have their challenges, but this has been a pretty fluid project for us.”