Spring Leadership Academy: 85,000 SF of Gravel Roof, Renewed Without a Tear-Off

The challenge

Gravel-surfaced built-up roofs were the standard on school buildings for decades, and a lot of them are still out there. The gravel protects the asphalt below from UV, but it also hides everything. You cannot see a split. You cannot see where the flashing has pulled. And you cannot coat over it, a fluid-applied system needs a sound, smooth substrate to bond to, and loose aggregate is the opposite of that.

At 85,000 square feet on an occupied campus, the scale made the decision harder. A full tear-off means an open roof over classrooms — and Spring Leadership Academy is a single connected campus, so there is no wing you can simply close off for a season. Every phase of the work had to be sequenced around a school day that never stopped.

What we did

We removed the gravel and spudded the surface smooth, taking the roof down to a sound, cleanable base. Then we installed a fabric-reinforced fluid-applied coating system across the entire area.

Getting to that base is the labor in a job like this. A truck-mounted commercial vacuum lifts the loose aggregate off the roof first. Spud machines then break out the residual gravel that has been embedded in the asphalt for decades, the crew vacuums a second time, and the last of it comes off by hand with spud bars until the surface is smooth enough to bond to. The alternative most contractors price — covering the old surface with a new board substrate to get something flat to work on — costs significantly more and adds weight instead of removing it.

Because that is the other thing gravel removal does: it takes load off the building. Roof gravel runs about 300 pounds per 1,000 square feet, so a roof this size was carrying roughly 25,000 pounds of rock. That dead weight and the structural stress that comes with it are gone permanently, and the gravel itself does not go to a landfill — it is hauled off and resold for driveways and gravel roof work.

The fabric layer is what separates this from a simple coating job. Embedding reinforcement into the system gives it tensile strength and lets it bridge the movement, splits and seams in an aging built-up roof instead of just sitting on top of them. What comes out the other side is effectively a new, monolithic membrane, one continuous surface with no laps, built over the existing deck.

Scheduling was its own piece of engineering. Spudding gravel is loud, so that work ran overnight, from midnight to morning, while the quieter vacuuming happened during the school day. Our crews stayed in direct contact with district principals throughout, so every building knew what was happening above it and when.

Why it matters for the campus

The existing roof stayed in place as the base layer. That kept 85,000 square feet of material out of a landfill, kept the building closed to weather throughout, and kept the work off the critical path of the school calendar.

There was also a calendar benefit the district had not counted on. Because the roof could be restored while school was in session, Spring ISD did not have to surrender a summer to it — they moved their interior renovations up and finished them in the same calendar year instead of splitting the campus into two phases across multiple years.

The finished white surface also changes how the building behaves in summer. Dark, gravel-covered roofs absorb heat and hand it straight to the HVAC system. A reflective surface over that same deck lowers the load, and on a campus this size that shows up on the utility bill.

One note on upkeep: a white roof only saves energy while it stays white. Houston air puts dirt on a reflective surface over time, so plan on washing the roof every four to five years to hold it at maximum reflectivity and efficiency.

Have a roof like this one?

Harvest restores commercial roofs across the Houston area — fluid-applied roofing and waterproofing over metal, single ply, modified bitumen and gravel-surfaced built-up systems. If your roof is aging and you want to know what it actually needs, we will come look at it.

Harvest · (281) 259-7099 · office@teamhis.com · harvestroofs.com