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Springfield Schools Asphalt Milling & Resurfacing 2026

Springfield City Schools took on the drives and parking at three campuses in a single 2026 season: Roosevelt Middle School, Kenwood Elementary and Simon Kenton Elementary.

School lots do not wear the way commercial lots do. They take bus traffic on a fixed daily pattern, sit nearly empty for two months, then absorb a full year of loading in ten — and the failures cluster. The bus lane, the dumpster pad, the turn into the drop-off loop give out while the rest of the surface still has years in it. That pattern is why districts keep deferring: a full reconstruction is priced against pavement that does not need it, and a thin overlay over a cracked base is money spent twice.

All three lots got the middle path. The existing surface was profile milled up to two inches and hauled off, chip sealed before any new asphalt went down, tacked with trackless emulsion, and resurfaced with up to two compacted inches of surface course. Where the pavement had failed through rather than worn out, the repair went deeper — 3,500 square yards milled a full four inches at both Kenwood and Simon Kenton, plus four-inch patching allowances of 1,900 square yards at Roosevelt and 1,200 at Kenwood, with the locations walked and agreed with the district before the crews mobilized. Car stops were pulled and stockpiled ahead of the work and reset afterward, every lot was restriped to a layout the district approved, and Roosevelt picked up four new speed bumps in its drive lane.

What the district ends up with is three campuses on the same surface age, which is the position you want to be in before planning the next cycle rather than after it.

Springfield City Schools took on the drives and parking at three campuses in a single 2026 season: Roosevelt Middle School, Kenwood Elementary and Simon Kenton Elementary.

What the district ends up with is three campuses on the same surface age, which is the position you want to be in before planning the next cycle rather than after it.

Resurfaced lot with a curbed landscape island and light pole base after paving

New asphalt drive lane and curb along the edge of the Springfield campus

Fresh white stall striping across a wet resurfaced lot at Springfield

Technical Discussion

Why there is a chip seal under the new asphalt

A mill-and-fill is the standard answer for a worn school lot: take two inches off, put two inches back, stripe it, done. It is quick, it prices well, and it looks perfect the day the barricades come down. The problem arrives in the second or third winter, when the cracks in the pavement you left behind work their way up through the new surface in the same pattern they always had. Reflective cracking is why a lot paved four years ago can already look like it was not.

On all three Springfield campuses the milled surface was chip sealed before the new asphalt went down. The chip seal fills and bridges the cracks in the pavement that stayed, and puts a flexible layer between the old surface and the new one, so movement below has something to be absorbed by instead of a straight path to daylight. It costs a step and a day in the schedule. It is the difference between a surface that ages and a surface that telegraphs.

The other half of the decision is where the money went instead. Rather than deepen the mill everywhere to chase the bad areas, the depth was matched to the failure: two inches across the lots, a full four inches over 3,500 square yards at Kenwood and Simon Kenton where the pavement was gone rather than worn, and four-inch patching allowances at Roosevelt and Kenwood with the locations walked with the district before mobilization rather than guessed at from an office.

Both halves are possible because this ran on a TOP-C cooperative unit-price contract. Quantities are priced per unit before the work starts, so a district can put repair dollars exactly where its own maintenance staff already know the lots are failing, and see what each of those calls costs before committing to it.

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