Marble Falls Elementary gym floor going in pieces

By Daniel Clifton • Daily Tribune Staff

MARBLE FALLS - Thousands of pairs of feet have run up and down the floor of the Marble Falls Elementary School gym. Hundreds of basketball games have gone to the final buzzer on it. And many couples have shuffled across those polished wooden planks during countless school dances.

With only a few months of existence left for the floor, the Marble Falls Independent School District wants community members to be able to have a piece of it.

Their idea? To trade on nostalgia and sell sections of the floor to help raise funds for school activities.

“I’ve had several questions about what we’re going to do with the gym floor,” Superintendent Ryder Warren said during a school board meeting Monday night.

The gym is slated for demolition in January to make room for renovations. But with so much history associated with the gym and the hardwood floor, the school board members gave their nod to allowing the district to offer 1-foot by 1-foot squares of the floor for sale.

The current gym has also served as the high school competition facility in past years. But to make room for improvements to the elementary campus, the gym will be torn down.

“In December, they’ll begin fencing off the area and then the gym’s scheduled for demolition in early January,” Warren said.

Warren said he would like to hold a closing ceremony for the gym before it is fenced off.

“I would like to hold it on a Saturday and invite the community to come and be a part of the closing,” he said. “Then Mr. (Mike) Phillips and the maintenance department could section off the gym in 1-by-1 squares and we could give them to the booster clubs to sell for fundraisers.”

Demolition of the gym isn’t something everybody in the community might want.

“There are going to be some people who are upset about this (tearing down the old gym),” said school board President Martin McLean.

Last November, district voters approved a bond package that included $10.8 million for renovating the MFES campus.

Earlier this year the board approved design schematics and plans for those renovations that included removing the current gym.

Warren agreed that some community members might find it difficult to see the gym destroyed.

“I had one woman tell me she met her husband at an eighth-grade dance on that gym floor,” he said. “But this way people have the chance to hold onto those memories by purchasing a piece of the floor.”

Warren said he hasn’t decided a time for the community closing.

daniel@thepicayune.com

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Marble Falls Elementary gym floor
going in pieces