Building RenovationWestern OhioDayton

Wayne High School Engineering Lab Renovation 2025

Wayne High School's engineering lab in Huber Heights has been rebuilt around how the class works: power and data floor boxes and relocated ceiling cord reels where the tables sit now, a new epoxy flake floor, new casework, desks, stools and task chairs, a wall display, and the program's wood-top worktables sanded, refinished and returned. Prodigy handled the architectural, electrical and data work for Huber Heights City Schools under a pre-bid TOP-C cooperative contract.

Wayne High School's engineering lab in Huber Heights teaches with equipment that moves. The worktables get pushed into different arrangements for different projects, the computer stations grow and shrink with the course load, and the power feeding all of it came from the walls and from a handful of ceiling-mounted cord reels hung over where the tables used to sit.

Huber Heights City Schools renovated the classroom and its office under a single CTE contract on a pre-bid TOP-C unit price agreement. In this space the work was architectural, electrical and data only. Built-in casework was removed. The whiteboard and projector came down, went into storage, and went back up. Carpet and cove base came out, the slab was ground and prepped, and a new epoxy flake floor went down in the classroom and the office with six-inch vinyl cove base. Walls were patched, primed and painted. The room's wood-top worktables were removed by the contractor, stored, sanded and refinished, then reinstalled — the district kept its tables and got them back better than they left.

New casework and countertops, a steel pegboard, 13 enclosed 60-inch classroom desks, 24 adjustable-height stools, 24 mesh-back task chairs, four storage cabinets and a 55-inch wall-mounted display furnish the room. The existing ceiling grid stayed; only the tiles disturbed by relocated cord reels were replaced. Electrically, existing circuits were reused, 12 new 20-amp circuits added, six combination power and data floor boxes set into the slab, five cord reels relocated over the new table positions, and a 208-volt receptacle run back to the panel. Every computer station has its own CAT 6 drop.

Workstations and tool benches in the Huber Heights engineering lab

Technical Discussion

Power and data for a room that keeps changing

A teaching lab gets renovated on the schedule of its finishes and rearranged on the schedule of its curriculum. The epoxy floor and the paint will outlast a decade. The table layout will not last five years. This renovation put its money into capacity the room will still be using after the third rearrangement.

Bar chart: one 20-amp circuit is rated 2,400 volt-amps and usable to 1,920 for continuous loads; the twelve new circuits add about 23,000 usable volt-amps to the Wayne High School engineering lab. — Figure 1 — Capacity in the rough-in is what lets the room be rearranged with furniture instead of an electrician.

Six floor boxes

Each is a combination power and data box: concrete cut, conduit and conductors run, box set, slab repoured. It is the most disruptive item in the scope and the only one that cannot be redone without breaking concrete a second time, which is why it happened while the carpet was already up for the epoxy floor. A box in the middle of the room is what lets a table sit there without a cord across a walkway.

Twelve circuits

Twelve new 20-amp, 120-volt circuits were added on top of the existing ones. A 20-amp circuit supplies 2,400 volt-amps, and for continuous loads the code limits it to 80 percent, or about 1,900. Twelve of them add roughly 23,000 volt-amps of new capacity, enough for several stations of computers, test equipment and small machines per circuit without tripping. Density in the rough-in is what lets the room be rearranged with furniture rather than with an electrician. A single 208-volt receptacle was run back to the panel for the class of equipment that does not run on 120 volts, installed while the conduit path was open.

One drop per station

Every computer station received its own CAT 6 data drop. Wireless is fine for a laptop and wrong for a lab of desktop workstations pulling the same files at the same time, and a wired drop per station removes the access point from the list of things that can slow a class down.

What was reused

Five existing ceiling-mounted cord reels were relocated over the new table positions rather than replaced, and only the ceiling tiles they disturbed were swapped in a grid that otherwise stayed. The existing wood-top worktables were sanded, refinished and returned.

When you plan a lab, count the circuits and the drops, not the outlets. Outlets are cheap to add on a wall. Circuits and floor boxes are cheap only once.

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