COVE — No classes are in session this week in the Cove School District due to the coronavirus. Still, there is brisk activity near the east edge of its campus.

Work crews are busy putting the finishing touches on the school district’s new food service building, which is set to open when classes begin again.

“Construction is wrapping up and then we will begin moving in later this week,” Cove High School principal Mat Miles said Monday.

Tables, kitchen equipment and food are being transferred from the old cafeteria into the new building in the process.

The move will be short in terms of distance. The new building is less than 75 yards from the school district’s old cafeteria and kitchen, yet it will represent a quantum leap. The new cafeteria building will be far more spacious than its old one. The present cafeteria has a capacity of about 40 students while the new one will be able to seat 200, making providing lunch to the district’s nearly 300 students much easier.

The school has encouraged students to eat lunch quickly so they could leave and make room for incoming students. In many cases, high school students have been eating their lunches in the hallways or classrooms to provide more room for students coming in to get meals.

Cove’s small cafeteria created scheduling problems, which cost students class time, Miles said. The new dining hall, he said, will prevent this class time from being lost.

The school district’s building fund is paying for the dining hall. Cove schools Superintendent Earl Pettit previously said the district will not take on debt as a result of the construction project.

The kitchen and cafeteria the food service building will replace is in Cove Elementary School, just west of the new new structure. The new building also will be filled with new kitchen equipment, replacing the outdated appliances the present cafeteria has. its features include a walk-in freezer and refrigerator for storage, neither of which the school district now has. Miles said the storage space is so limited now that food has had to be kept at sites throughout the campus including a freezer in the bus barn area.

The space where the cafeteria is will be converted into an area used for providing counseling services and specialized reading instruction for students can be provided. These services are provided in a modular building on campus. The modular will later be torn down.

Mike Becker General Contractor of La Grande is the general contractor for the project. The architectural work has been done by Design West Architects which has offices in Meridian, Idaho; Kennewick, Washington and Pullman, Washington.

This represents the Cove School District’s third construction project in at least the past 25 years. Two additional classrooms were built about 10 years ago and a music room was constructed in the early 1990s.