Wareham High School basketball games will no longer be rained out.

Workers have wrapped up the replacement of the gym roof.

Town Meeting voters approved $110,000 for the repair in the fall, after the chronically leaking roof shut down parts of the gym during classes and canceled home sporting events. The project came in significantly under budget, and is expected to total approximately $69,000. The additional money will not be borrowed.

School administrators had hoped that the project could be finished during students' holiday break, but unfortunately, Old Man Winter interfered.

"We had a few setbacks because of the weather," said Wareham High School Principal Scott Palladino.

Luckily, the noisiest part of the repair — removing the rocks that cover the roof — was completed when students were on vacation, so classes have not been significantly disturbed.

"The good news is, in the gymnasium, there's a certain amount of noise in the classroom during the day," Palladino said.

Students are currently working on their basketball skills.

"Those kids make enough noise with the balls, dribbling," the principal noted.

Palladino said he was relieved to learn that despite years-long issues with the roof, there was minimal damage to insulation, and no damage to the roof's metal structure.

The problem was with the roof's rubber membrane, which is flawed by design. The membrane is covered by rocks, so finding leaks was like looking for a needle in a haystack. Then, workers had to be careful when moving the rocks to repair the membrane, because it could be torn further.

The gym floor suffered a small amount of damage, but only to the polyurethane coating. It will be stripped and recoated during summer vacation, Palladino said.

The gym is the first area of the high school to get a replacement roof. Palladino said the district will likely have to replace the entire roof in the coming years, as it uses that same membrane/rock system.

The gym roof, however, "was definitely, from a square-footage standpoint, the worst area in the building," Palladino said.

After a Proposition 2½ debt exclusion — which would have raised property taxes temporarily to pay for the roof repairs — was defeated at the ballot in July, Wareham High School students pleaded with the community to support borrowing funding for the roof repair at Town Meeting.

Students Nicole Nault and Charlemya Erasme presented a petition to Town Meeting voters that was signed by 416 of the high school’s 600 students, and the measure was overwhelmingly approved.

"We're pretty excited. The classes that meet in there will now be able to utilize 100% of the gym," said Palladino. "There were days when you could only utilize half of the gymnasium."