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Oak Hills School District Paving 2025

Oak Hills High School's mapped paving areas were milled two inches, repaved and restriped in summer 2025, with a catch basin rebuilt to grade and the car stops pulled and reset. It is one season in a program: Oak Hills has paved on a calendar from 2018 through the 2026 season, resetting a section each summer before it gets expensive. Each year is bought against the same pre-bid TOP-C cooperative unit prices.

Oak Hills School District has been paving on a calendar rather than on an emergency, and has been doing it for years — paving contracts run from 2018 through the 2026 season. Each summer takes a mapped set of areas rather than a whole campus, which is why no single year has ever had to carry a full reconstruction.

The 2025 contract is the current example of the pattern. It covers the paving areas identified in four colors on the Oak Hills High School site map. Car stops are pulled and stockpiled, one catch basin in the drive lane of the south lot is reconstructed to grade, and the marked areas are profile milled two inches deep with the millings hauled off site. Trackless tack goes down, then two compacted inches of surface course asphalt. The lot is striped to match the layout it already had, and the stockpiled car stops go back where they came from. Final completion on the high school work was signed in August 2025.

What the district has at the end of each of these summers is not a finished district — it is one more section of pavement reset before it got expensive, bought against the same pre-bid TOP-C unit price schedule as the year before it and the year after.

Paver and dump truck laying new asphalt beside the Oak Hills school

Freshly striped parking stalls on new asphalt at Oak Hills High School, looking toward the building

Drone view straight down on new white stall striping, arrows and yellow centerline at Oak Hills High School

Technical Discussion

Tack coat: the thin layer that lets two inches act like the whole pavement

The line in a mill-and-overlay scope that gets the least attention is the one between the milling and the paving: furnish and install trackless tack. It is a film of asphalt emulsion a fraction of a millimeter thick, and it decides whether the new two inches last fifteen years or five.

Two pavement sections under the same wheel load. With a tack coat bonding the 2-inch overlay to the existing pavement, tension occurs at the bottom of the full section. Without a bond, tension occurs at the underside of the 2-inch overlay alone. — Figure 1 — A bonded overlay borrows the strength of the pavement beneath it. An unbonded one works alone.

Bonded layers share the load

A pavement resists a wheel the way a beam resists a load: the top compresses and the bottom stretches, and asphalt cracks where it stretches. When a new two-inch surface is bonded to the pavement below, the two act as one thick beam, and the stretching happens deep in the old structure where it always did. Without a bond the new lift bends by itself. The bottom of a two-inch layer stretches far more than the bottom of a six-inch section under the same wheel, and pavement research has repeatedly found that losing the bond can cut fatigue life by half or more.

What failure looks like

An unbonded overlay shows it first where vehicles brake and turn: the entrance, the bus loop, the end of a drive aisle. The surface slides on the layer below and tears into crescent-shaped cracks that open toward the direction of travel. Those are slippage cracks, and sealing them does nothing, because the problem is underneath.

Why trackless

Conventional tack stays sticky until the paver covers it. In the meantime the haul trucks drive across it, pick it up on their tires and carry it out to the street. The places they drive are the wheel paths, which are the exact strips that needed the bond most. Trackless tack is made from a harder asphalt that cures in minutes to a film that does not stick to a tire at ambient temperature and reactivates under the heat of the new mix. It stays where it was sprayed. A milled surface also helps: the grooves left by the milling drum roughly double the contact area and give the new mix something to key into.

When you read a paving scope, find the tack line. It should name the product, and the crew should be able to tell you the application rate they are holding. A uniform black film across the whole milled surface before the paver arrives, with no bare wheel tracks, is what you are paying for.

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