photo by: Dylan Lysen/Lawrence Journal-World

Lawrence Public Schools district offices pictured in April 2021.

Five years after the shade structures at Free State High School’s soccer field were removed, the Lawrence school board has set aside about $118,000 to install two new ones.

In 2018, the structures were taken out while improvements were made to the field as part of the district’s $5.2 million effort to update its athletic facilities at the two high schools. However, once the improvements to the field were done, the shade structures were “inadvertently not replaced,” school board member Ronald “G.R.” Gordon-Ross said during Monday night’s board meeting.

“We removed them, so we need to replace them,” Gordon-Ross said before the board approved the money for the shade structures and the other items on the district’s consent agenda with a unanimous vote. “It’s just taken a while to get to that point.”

Larry Englebrick, the district’s chief operations officer, said that Joe Waldron, the head coach for the Free State boys and girls soccer teams, was the first one to inform him about the need for the new structures.

After the coach reached out in January, “we started looking into it and spent quite a bit of time on the design to make sure we were getting what the coach and administration wanted,” Englebrick said.

Englebrick said the district “did a couple minor changes on the overall structure from beginning to end,” but that many things would be similar to the old designs, including the reuse of the original concrete pads that have remained beneath the turf.

This isn’t the only outdoor shade structure project proposed for Lawrence school district facilities. As the Journal-World reported, a shade structure has been proposed for the playground at Hillcrest Elementary School, and it would be designed and built by University of Kansas architecture students. Englebrick said that project still needed to get approval through the district’s facilities planning process, and that he’d had an initial meeting with stakeholders from Hillcrest and the KU architecture program in July. So far, the money for that project has come exclusively from private sources, not from the school district.