After more than 50 years of service, Grandview Elementary School in northeast Provo is set for demolition, as soon as the asbestos is removed.

The district was waiting to demolish the building until the teachers had moved out and crews had removed asbestos from the more than 30,000 square feet the district must tear down, said Phil Lott, Provo School District's director of facilities and transportation. Demolition is set for July 7. "We can't tear it down with any asbestos in it," Lott said.

Crews have been removing the asbestos this week, said Laken Cannon, community relations director for the Provo School District.

Robert Ford, environmental program manager for the state division of air quality, said asbestos is known to cause cancer. State and federal regulations require the removal of asbestos from buildings before demolition if the material containing asbestos is likely to release fibers into the air during the tear down. Materials containing asbestos that won't release fibers into the air don't have to be removed.

"It's just a human health standard for the people that are doing the work or the people adjacent to it," Ford said.

Asbestos can be found in floor tiles, roof shingles, building glue and other materials, even in new buildings.

"Typically, older buildings tend to have more, but there's really no ban on putting asbestos in buildings today," Ford said.

The Division of Air Quality inspects buildings before they are torn down to ensure that no remaining asbestos can be released into the air.

Former patrons of the school shouldn't find any left over asbestos in the mementoes they can retrieve from the building.

Cannon said bricks from the school will be made available at the northeast corner of the Grandview lot. The public can retrieve them, but the district is asking patrons to stay off the construction site for safety reasons.

"We appreciate the community's support and wish to facilitate their remembering of this wonderful educational center as much as possible. While the bricks are not available as of this minute, we will begin the collection of such immediately," Cannon wrote in an e-mail.

Former Grandview Elementary School principal Drew Daniels said he has received requests from alumni for pieces of the building, including one woman who'd like to use the building's bricks as bookends. Lott said the bricks will be placed on the northeast side of the lot near where the kindergarten classrooms are located.

The district will not demolish the entire Grandview building but will save the newer parts for a special magnet program and other district uses. The district will save four classrooms, the library and two gyms -- about 17,000 square feet -- for use in an accelerated learning program, more professional development space and home of technical offices.

Assistant Superintendent Ray Morgan said approximately 85 fourth-, fifth- and sixth-grade students will attend the Center for Accelerated Studies, which will use the four classrooms, portions of the library and gymnasium space.

The Center for Accelerated Studies will have a mathematics emphasis.

"It's designed for students who are performing at very accelerated levels academically," Morgan said.

The rest of the space will hold offices for technology specialists and be used to hold meetings and teacher in-services. Morgan said it has been hard to find places to hold large gatherings because the district has only a few suitable spaces.

The Provo School board voted to close Grandview Elementary School in October last year. The district determined that it would be more cost-efficient to run one fewer elementary school once Lakeview Elementary School, which is scheduled to open in August, was built in west Provo. Daniels is now the principal of the Lakeview Elementary.

• Brittani Lusk can be reached at 344-2549 or at blusk@heraldextra.com.