Carl DeJulio experiences the same frustration others do when he walks through Montour High School.

Students are crowded into roughly half of the building housing 11th and 12th grades, with partitions blocking off the rest. Behind the partitions, nothing seems to be happening.

"If I walk this site or you walk it, the only thing you see going on really is Mr. [facilities manager Robert] Rosensteel getting a lot of furniture out," Dr. DeJulio said Wednesday, after briefing the Montour School Board on construction progress the previous night.

That is partly because the work now involves utilities -- electric, sewer and water lines -- and partly because greater-than-expected amounts of asbestos in the building forced rethinking of demolition plans.

The plan now is for a contractor to remove asbestos and gut the interior of the blocked-off parts of the building in one shot, rather than in two steps, which should keep the project on schedule. That work is scheduled to begin Dec. 5, with the general contractor moving in to start the building process March 21.

Montour is at the beginning of a $48.6 million renovation plan that will add an office wing linking the two high school buildings and create a large area devoted to technology education, the focal point of Montour's revised curriculum. Completion is pegged for spring 2011.

School board members who are concerned about the apparent lack of work being done have been pushing for an exact schedule. Dr. DeJulio -- formerly the district's acting superintendent, now a consultant overseeing the construction -- offered an update at Tuesday's board meeting.

The primary delay, according to a letter from chief architect Victor Graves of Graves & McLean, was that the blueprints of the existing school indicated that it contained little asbestos. But the most recent asbestos report turned out to be from 1987, and further exploration showed far more than the architects expected.

An asbestos consultant did a thorough analysis, but not until the end of August, pushing everything back. Among other things, water to be used in the asbestos abatement would have caused problems with a major electrical conduit, forcing some redesign and work to move the electric lines.

Combining the asbestos removal and demolition should keep the project on schedule, according to Dr. DeJulio.

The key, he said, is to have construction done by the end of the school year so that the partitioning can be redone over the summer, putting students into new spaces and preparing other spaces for the next construction phase.

"The entire project is planned so that phasing work and preparation can be done over the summer," he said, so that children don't have to change classrooms in the middle of the school year.

Dr. DeJulio also said he doesn't believe it would have helped to wait another year and gather more information.

"What I hear all the time around construction trailers is that 'It is what it is,' " he said. "What they tell me is that you really don't know what you're going to hit anyway -- in construction you sort of find out what you have as you go."