Long-time maintenance employee Gary Stigen retired from the Haines Borough School District after 17 years. Stigen helped get the new school built and helped demolish the old high school. Prior to working at the school, Stigen served six years on the school board.
Colleague and former teacher Sam McPhetres said Stigen would walk completely around and inside the school, checking for anything that needed to be fixed that particular day.
When Stigen started working, he said they had just moved out of the old school. His first year consisted of a lot of organizing.
Stigen witnessed the roof repair completed a few years back.
The roof repairs were done in sections, starting with the high school gym. Stigen said he advocated fixing the roof of the gym first because “if the water comes through, it ruins a nice $50,000 floor that we just got replaced.”
He said getting the roof improvements done was “a big deal” and was done without the state’s help. Talking about the roof, Stigen was very adamant that people should “never go on the roof” because it might compromise it.
Before the repairs, superintendent Lilly Boron said, “there were 13 five-gallon buckets of water that we dumped every single day and that was just in the gym, not counting the big trash can we had in the music room.” Boron was the high school principal at the time, and remembered having to dump out the collected water daily.
Stigen said that it’s almost impossible to completely waterproof the roof of the school, but “we’ve done a lot of it.”
Stigen also slowly replaced fluorescent lights with LEDs.
“I think the story of my life is light bulbs,” Stigen said. “You’re always doing light bulbs.” He said that the parking lot, music room and locker rooms all now have LED bulbs.
Water leaks and clogs made up some of Stigen’s most memorable fixes — including what he calls his worst day at work.
“I came in one morning and there was water pouring everywhere when I did my walk-through,” Stigen said. He explained that an area on the roof with parapets on all four sides collects water. An area drain was clogged with leaves that day. Stigen said the area could hold roughly 6,000 gallons of water so he donned his rubber boots and pulled the leaves out.
Inside the building, the school has three boilers which are getting to the point of wearing out. Sometimes, as Stigen said, “you do have surprises,” like one morning when he walked into the boiler room and there was water all over the floor. One boiler is always actively running, one is a back-up and one is there “You take care of the things you need to take care of,” Stigen said. Stigen’s replacement has been hired while other positions, two special education instructors and a kindergarten teacher, remain open.