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09/25/2018 12:00 AMWhile many questions remain about the $100 million Board of Education (BOE) school maintenance plan, the BOE, Board of Selectmen (BOS), and Board of Finance (BOF) came together on Sept. 20 to try to sketch out a path forward because the clock is ticking.
The BOE unveiled the maintenance plan back in June and unanimously approved the document. The three boards then met back in July for the first tri-board meeting at which officials started to discuss how to figure out what projects need to happen, when, and just how much money the town might be willing to invest in aging buildings.
A lot of those conversations continued at the Sept. 20 meeting, but with a heightened understanding that some decisions are going to need to be made soon. The plan has projects broken out by fiscal year as well as school and there are projects listed for the upcoming fiscal year.
A United Front
BOE members and town officials have agreed that since this maintenance has to do with the buildings and not curriculum, everyone has some skin in this game. However, at the meeting, BOS and BOF members asked the BOE what exactly they wanted to see from the other boards.
“Because this is something that affects everybody in town, we were really hoping to do this as a tri-board,” said BOE Chair Katie Stein. “Now whether or not we move forward with all 19 of us or a smaller committee working group to really kind of tease out what the issues are I don’t know, but I think as a board it is safe to say we felt like getting input from the other boards in town was really important.”
Officials agreed that joint leadership, meaning the chairs of the three boards, would meet to discuss how large a committee should be formed with various board members to tackle this plan and help sketch out a way forward, not in terms of solutions, but in terms of presenting all of the information to the public.
In the meantime, Selectman Bruce Wilson said he doesn’t want to get stuck on the $100 million number or trying to reduce that number. As he put it, even if you find $5 million in projects to cut, you still have a $95 million problem. He said each board needs a firm grasp on its respective role in any future decision-making.
“I think the BOS need to take a look over the horizon, what we see in the same time frame on a capital basis, and then I think we need to turn to the BOF to get guidance on what our collective allowance might be and what might be paid for,” he said. “Something like, ‘This is how much we can tolerate you putting into CIP and funding out of cash’ and ‘This is how much bonding we can tolerate.’ The two operating entities really need to modulate their capital expectations according to what the BOF feels is a responsible budgeting number and that modulation can be dollars or it can be time. We have two big levers to pull.”
The CIP Problem
The town has a five-year Capital Improvement Program (CIP) that lists all capital projects or investments, in a long term planning document. A single year of the plan is voted on with the budget in the spring for the coming fiscal year. The CIP Committee is already meeting to review projects that might go forward for fiscal year 2019-’20.
The maintenance plan for the schools has projects starting in the 2019-’20 fiscal year, which would mean those projects need to be rolled into the CIP. BOF and CIP member Bennett Pudlin said the BOE needs to start clarifying what projects are coming to CIP and why very soon.
“I think it would be critical for us to have some clarity on the standards on the items you are advancing in the first year of the plan,” he said. “I think it would be essential to us to understand, because we are all kind of assuming that you wouldn’t put forward anything that would commit you to a direction you might not want to take.”
Since some of the numbers attached to various schools are so large, there had been some prior discussion about throwing good money after bad and that board members might need to think about a more creative solution for certain buildings. To that end, Pudlin said he wouldn’t want to see the town invest money on a project in a school building now if the town decides later it wants to build new or renovate.
“We talked about a parallel that the 10-year plan would be in the CIP binder and what we would be considering for CIP fiscal year 2019-’20,” said Superintendent of Schools Tom Scarice. “We talked as a committee that we would revisit those items at the next facilities meeting, because if we are going to advance some other discussions, we have to consider what is there.”
Picking Apart the Projects
While Scarice said he didn’t want to get too deep into the weeds on any one project, Wilson expressed concern over one item, a playground at Brown Middle School, that is in the maintenance plan for the coming fiscal year.
The playground has been a point of conversation before, due likely in part to the $600,000 price tag, but Wilson said his concern centered on the fact that the BOE is having an open house in early October at Brown to show parents and residents the site for the playground and the design.
“Aren’t you running the risk of setting an expectation around this project before it has been decided?” Wilson asked. “It has not been before the CIP, so it is not a funded project. I am trying to make sense of where you guys are going.”
BOE member Seth Klaskin said the playground is well researched and is an important part of the shift that will happen at Brown next year in terms of grade levels. Once Island Avenue Elementary School closes, the remaining elementary schools go to a K-3 model and Brown becomes a 4-5.
“We don’t anticipate whatever planning we are doing is likely to touch Brown School,” he said. “We just made significant improvements to Brown School so we are likely looking at the elementary schools or Polson for major updates...It’s important that we consider programmatic needs when we are moving kids to a new situation and new building to have an appropriate play area.”
The Big Picture
All board members agreed that public input will have to be a critical part of any future decision making. To that end, board members also pointed out that educating residents and framing the discussion is going to be important, too.
“The information given to the public is we are going to embark on a plan that spends $11.5 million on Ryerson and the result of that is we are going to make a 20-year commitment to that building,” said Wilson. “The community has to say we are happy with that or the community needs to speak up and say that is unacceptable, come back to us with a new building. It has to be framed to the public like that. This investment represents a significant time commitment to the existing building, is that OK with you?”
The Plan
The long-term Capital Improvement Plan, which can be viewed in full with this story at Zip06.com, ranges from fiscal year 2018-’19 to fiscal year 2032–’33; the projects are divided by building. The BOE voted on June 19 to send the next five years’ worth of projects forward to the CIP Committee and BOS for their consideration. Those five years of projects alone total roughly $61 million. Once the five-year plan reaches the CIP, that committee can recommend more or less funding for each project and/or reject a project all together.
On the document, each listed project comes with a link to a report explaining the cost and indicating a priority level. Priority was determined under certain criteria including security, severity of condition, code or statutory need, programmatic need, and sequencing (for example, the need to update the electrical system before updating the HVAC system). Each criterion came with a ranking of 0 to 5, with five being the most urgent need. The total from each criterion was added together to create the total priority number, which helped guide placement of each project across the 14-year span.
Since the plan includes projects that might not take place for another 10 years, price escalation was built into each estimate. For Daniel Hand High School, the total cost over the life of the plan comes to roughly $13 million.
Polson Middle School, built in 1960 and set to expand to a grade 6 to 8 school versus a grade 7 to 8 school in fall 2019, has the highest total project cost of all the schools for a total of $39.6 million. There are 30 projects listed for Polson, including items such as window replacements, lock room renovations, transformation of one of the gyms into learning spaces, electrical updates, and ADA compliance updates.
Brown Middle School, built in 1970 and set to become a grade 4 to 5 intermediate school versus a grade 5 to 6 school in fall 2019, has a total of $11.7 million in projects listed.
Jeffrey Elementary School, built in 1957 and set to become a K to 3 elementary school in fall 2019 after the district closes Island Avenue Elementary, is the more costly of what will be the two remaining elementary schools. The total cost is $16.9 million.
Ryerson Elementary School, built in 1968 and also set to become a K to 3 elementary school in fall 2019, has projects totaling $12.6 million.
There are no costs associated with Island Avenue Elementary School, which is set to close in 2019 when the district shrinks from six schools to five schools in response to declining enrollment. The plan also lists a total of $1.1 million in projects for the Town Campus Learning Center (TCLC) and $2.8 million in athletics-based projects across the district.