Freshmen at Lockport Township High School will likely shift to learning at the former Lincoln-Way North High School in Frankfurt, as officials inspect a central campus building where a ceiling collapsed in a classroom last week.

The ceiling of a third-floor classroom collapsed sometime early morning Nov. 2, the school district said. No one was present when the collapse occurred, and no one was injured.

Supt. Robert McBride said at an emergency board of education meeting Tuesday that repairs of the central campus building are “going to take longer than we thought.” The building only serves freshmen.

Central campus students have been attending classes online since the collapse. 

The board of education approved a resolution Tuesday that would allow Lockport Township High School to use the former Lincoln-Way North High School, which closed in 2016, as a temporary alternative site. The schools are nearly 20 miles apart.

“The obvious benefit is that it has every amenity – it’s built for high schoolers,” McBride said. “It does need some work to kind of get it ramped back up, but it would allow us to operate…except where we would have a greater distance of 25 to 30 minutes away, depending on how I-80 is behaving.”

The plan awaits approval from Lincoln-Way Community High School District 210, which scheduled an emergency meeting for Thursday to vote on the proposal.

McBride said the school district aims to have students moved to Lincoln-Way North “maybe as early as Monday, hopefully by Wednesday.”

McBride also told the board Tuesday that it should consider repairing multiple ceilings throughout the central campus building, which he estimated could take two or three months.

An architectural analysis of the central campus building found other areas in the 114-year-old building that are considered a medium-to-high risk of failure.

McBride said that last week’s collapse was likely caused by deterioration over time.

“We know that (above the ceiling) was plaster placed on a metal mesh,” McBride said. “That plaster and metal mesh were affixed to wood furring strips and wood framing by nails. (Architects) believe that those nails – under stress, time, duration, weight – slipped out, and enough started slipping and they all came down.”

The collapse spurred further examination of the building, McBride said. Officials have since been cutting holes into the ceilings of almost every classroom in the building for inspection.