Students and staff at Dicken Elementary gathered in a light drizzle Wednesday, Sept. 30, to watch the final steel beam rise into place on their new school building.

The topping-off ceremony marked a construction milestone for the kindergarten-through-fifth-grade school at 2135 Runnymede Blvd. in southwest Ann Arbor. Before the beam went up, current students signed it, putting their names inside a building that will serve future Dicken families for decades, according to the district.

The beam carried a traditional evergreen on top. The construction custom symbolizes good luck and a prosperous future for a building's occupants.

The new Dicken is going up immediately south of the current school, a one-story brick building constructed in 1957. DLR Group designed the replacement. Brix Corporation is managing construction, according to the AAPS bond program site. As of late September, structural steel and cross-laminated timber installation were both near completion, with exterior framing and concrete floor work underway.

The rebuild is part of the second phase of Ann Arbor Public Schools' capital bond program, funded by the $1 billion bond voters approved in 2019. The district is rebuilding several elementary schools under the program. Crews broke ground at Dicken on May 2, 2025, as MLive reported.

At that groundbreaking, former principal Mike Madison, who led the school from 2007 to 2020, described the long wait for a new facility. "The building's pretty old, and I was putting duct tape on it, trying to get this fixed, that fixed, and doing the best we could," Madison told MLive in May 2025.

The school board has continued approving contracts for the project. On Aug. 12, trustees voted 7-0 to award a $1.2 million audio-visual and low-voltage contract to Decima LLC of Detroit, funded from capital program funds.

The new school is expected to be operational by late 2027. Water main work tied to the construction is scheduled to restart over fall break, Oct. 9-12.