FAIRVIEW PARK, Ohio -- The Fairview Park City School District recently received permission from the city for a seven-day construction work schedule in order to complete the installation of an underground stormwater detention system in the service driveway off Campus Drive.

The work is part of the district's $35.2 million permanent improvement project, which started this fall at Fairview High School and Mayer Middle School, and is scheduled for completion in early 2020.

Saturday and Sunday work began last weekend and will run through Aug. 18.

"We knew that we had a lot of work yet to do for the underwater stormwater retention systems that we wanted to have in the ground before kids showed up on campus on Aug. 22," Superintendent Bill Wagner said. "By moving to a seven-day work week, we're going be able to accomplish that."

Fairview Park Director of Public Service & Development Shawn Leininger said the Sunday work can't start earlier than 9 a.m. and must be completed by 6 p.m.

"Occasionally, exceptions are requested by contractors to construction work times," Leininger said. "Any request is carefully scrutinized by the city, and every alternative exhausted before granting the request. Many requests are not approved."

Wagner stressed that while the work calendar was expanded with the weekend schedule, this doesn't mean the project overall is running over budget.

"We're running some overtime just to get that aggressive construction calendar we wanted to accomplish this summer," Wagner said.

"We knew that we were going to have to work really hard to meet those goals, so this is just an extension of that. The more we can do now, the less we'll need to do in some of the other phases," he said.

There's an additional Sunday work day planned for next month. On Sept. 23, a helicopter will deliver heavy-duty HVAC equipment to the high school.

"There are two different ways of getting equipment onto the roof of a building," Wagner said. "Either bring one of those really large-scale cranes and then you have to sort of assemble it on site or you can literally do a helicopter drop. So the helicopter method is more efficient."

Considering that Fairview High School does have an Innovation Center on campus, perhaps Wagner should have asked creative students to figure out the heavy lifting.

"That's right, we'll just get a thousand drones and lift it up that way," Wagner laughed.