school project*

By Alice Waugh

(Editor’s note: this story has been corrected to include a link to the SBAC’s final report, which previously was available only in draft form.)

The School Building Advisory Committee (SBAC) will present its final report to the School Committee tonight—a report that says Lincoln should pursue state funding for a modified “L-shaped” building and renovation project rather than a “repair only” pathway.

The School Committee meeting starts at 7 p.m. in the Hartwell Multipurpose Room with a continuation of the FY15 preliminary budget presentation. The SBAC is second on the agenda and is expected to begin around 7:45 p.m. There will be time for public questions and comments.

The SBAC was formed to discuss alternatives to the school project that failed to win the required two-thirds majority at a Special Town Meeting a year ago. Under that plan, the state would have provide $21 million for a $49 million project. Some residents subsequently called for a modified design in which the building would be L-shaped, or a more modest and inexpensive repair-only plan.

The report can be viewed and downloaded here. Among its discussion points:

• “The realization that repairs alone, while critical to the maintaining the physical integrity of the buildings, will not further the educational objectives.
• “The possibility that the MSBA [Massachusetts School Building Authority] will not support the project and the implications of such a decision on the ‘pathways’ available to the town.
• “The implementation problems associated with any L-shaped pathway pursued by the School Committee.
• “The issue of whether school campus on Ballfield Road should serve as a potential location for a community center.”

The report examines two hypothetical pathways for a school project—one that assumes MSBA funding and one without such funding—though it did not go into specific plans or cost estimates for either route.

“Although the Committee’s members began their work with very different ideas about what the school buildings needed, they, after weeks of work and deliberations, reached a consensus on what the schools require. These needs are significant and expensive,” the report says. “Thus, MSBA funding is essential for the School Committee being able to implement its comprehensive plan for school facility improvements and repairs that will support educational enhancement at the Lincoln School.”

Lincoln is currently awaiting action on its latest statement of interest (SOI), the first step in applying for a grant from the MSBA. The MSBA’s board of directors is meeting today, though the posted agenda does not include Lincoln.

In an FAQ page on its website, the MSBA explains that SOIs are not considered on a first-come, first-served basis, but rather on several factors, including the “extent and urgency” of a school’s problems relative to those described in other SOIs. More than 200 schools submitted SOIs to the MSBA for consideration in fiscal 2013.

If a renewed offer of MSBA funding doesn’t materialize, “the town will be placed in a difficult position because it will not be able to address the legitimate needs of the schools in a comprehensive manner,” the SBAC report says. “What the town would be willing to pay for under these circumstances is unclear. However, what is clear is that the Town would have to do some deep soul-searching about how much it values the education of its children supported by appropriate facilities and the nexus between a high quality school system and property values.”

The SBAC explored various “repair-only” scenarios under the assumption that this approach would be less expensive than a full-fledged renovation and construction project. However, members found that “any significant repair effort would likely trigger major [building] code requirements and force very significant expenditures. A project designed as a $6 million repair could turn quickly into a repair and code compliance project easily costing $12-$14 million. A project designed to avoid triggering codes would likely not be sufficiently large in scope so as to reasonably guarantee successful and continued facility operation over the mid/long term. It would also present an increased risk of multiple emergency-type repairs,” the report says.

Another reason the SBAC rejected a repair-only pathway is that “such a project would have limited, if any, educational or security benefits.” Without MSBA funding, critical features of the previous plan would have to be eliminated as too costly, including “much-needed” cafeterias and flexible learning spaces as well as a link to the Reed Gym; improvement to the second- and third-grade space; special-needs improvements; improved lighting, air quality and acoustics; and a solution to the ongoing problem of Smith boiler room flooding.

The SBAC looked at the possibility of having a community center tied in some way to a school project but concluded that the town isn’t far enough along in discussions about that idea.

“The committee is concerned about the needs of the schools not being addressed by the town until the town decides what, if anything, it wants to do about a community center. In the view of the committee, this places the proverbial cart before the proverbial horse. The needs of the schools are real; they need to be addressed now, not at some undetermined point in the future,” the report says.

Members of the SBAC are Doug Adams, Ken Bassett, Owen Beenhouwer, Vincent Cannistraro, Tim Christenfeld, Hathaway Russell, Steven P. Perlmutter (chair), Maggy Pietropaolo, Peter Sugar and Gary Taylor.

By Alice Waugh

As Lincoln girds for a second go-round on trying to get a school building project approved by voters, the School Committee is creating a School Building Project Citizen Advisory Committee (CAC) and is seeking volunteers for that new group.

[Read more…] about Citizen advisory committee to offer “pathways” for school project

By Alice Waugh

Lincoln officials are reworking a document from the rejected school building project in preparation for resubmitting it to the state, and town residents will be asked for an as-yet-undetermined sum of money for project planning expenses at Town Meeting later this month.

The School Committee last week began going over the town’s original Statement of Interest (SOI) preparatory to making updates, and the Board of Selectman will do the same at their meetings on March 11 and March 18. The School Committee will schedule a one-hour community forum as part of its March 21 meeting to answer questions about the SOI and the warrant article to go before voters at Town Meeting on March 23.

The committee will also vote on March 21 on whether to submit the revised SOI to the Massachusetts School Building Authority. That agency recently told the town that the “L-shaped proposal” would not qualify for preapproved funding and said the town would have to start over with the state approval and funding process for a school building project.

Warrant article 9 asks for money to “[conduct] architectural/engineering studies and designs to address facilities issues of the Lincoln School” without specifying an exact amount. If the MSBA had said yes to the L-shaped proposal, that request would have been $400,000 for design documents required before going out to bid on construction.

Now, however, residents will be asked in Article 10 for a different sum of money to proceed with planning—although the dollar amount of that request won’t be known until shortly before Town Meeting, said School Committee chairman Jennifer Glass. However, she emphasized that “by no stretch of the imagination” would the request be as high as $400,000 and would in fact be “a lot less.”

In the last round of approvals, funding and votes for the school project, the town submitted its SOI in 2008. Based on that, the MSBA invited the town in fall 2009 to submit a feasibility study, and Lincoln residents voted to fund that study in March 2010. The town vote on funding the project itself took place in November 2012 at a special Town Meeting, where the measure failed to garner the necessary two-thirds majority.

Glass noted that Lincoln took longer than expected to gets its construction funding request before residents. Also, the MSBA is likely to act more quickly this time around, since it has already acknowledged the need for a school building project of some sort. Given these variables, Lincoln could be looking at a fall 2013 acceptance of a new feasibility study and perhaps another town vote on construction funding in late 2015; if that vote is successful, the project could be put out to bid in January 2016, Glass said.

More spending ahead

Given the delay of approximately three years in starting a major renovation and addition project (if residents eventually do approve such a course), the school will have to “patch things up and make them continue,” Glass said. Even if the original project had gone ahead, the school would have needed a new main fire alarm panel immediately. That $36,000 expenditure appears in Article 9 of the Town Meeting warrant.

Other school-related expenditures in that warrant article include $105,000 to replace wooden window curtain walls and insulate masonry walls in the Hartwell building, and $40,000 for increased security measures in the wake of the Newtown, Conn., school shooting. Glass declined to specify what those measures might be, though she said they do not include armed guards.

Article 12 also asks for
$75,000 for the annual classroom rehabilitation and preventive maintenance program. That amount would have been only $50,000 if the building project had been approved by the state, but the town’s Capital Planning Committee recently green-lighted the higher amount, Glass said.

“Even though it’s a big-ticket item and I totally understand people’s shock” at the project’s $49 million price tag ($28 million from by Lincoln residents and the other $21 million from the state), “I still believe in the long run that the right thing for the building, for [town] finances and for [minimizing] disruption for the kids is to do this as one project that’s carefully planned and thought through and not done in a piecemeal fashion,” Glass said.

State officials this week gave a thumbs-down to the “L-shaped proposal” for the Lincoln school project, saying it’s different than the one they approved earlier—and therefore it doesn’t qualify for a promised $21 million in state aid for the work.

In a February 27 conference call, Massachusetts School Building Authority officials told Superintendent of Schools Becky McFall and School Committee chairman Jennifer Glass that the L-shaped proposal is a different project because the “sizes, locations and adjacencies” of the rooms are different, meaning the project has a different scope of work from the previously approved project, and also because there is a change in the ratio between new construction and renovation, McFall and Glass wrote in a school district email on Thursday.

[Read more…] about State says no to L-shaped school proposal

By Alice Waugh

School officials have formally asked the state to approve a new “L-shaped” design for the Lincoln School so the town can still receive $21 million in state aid that was promised as part of an earlier plan approved by the state but which didn’t garner enough resident support at Town Meeting.

The L-shaped proposal advocated by residents including Douglas Adams and Ken Bassett calls for retaining the 1994 portion of the Smith building and demolishing and rebuilding the older portion closer to Brooks, thereby reducing the size of the block of new construction just south of the current Brooks building. Proponents feel this option would retain more of the “campus green” feel by maintaining more physical separation between the younger and older groups of students and making fewer changes to the landscaping.

[Read more…] about Town asks state to consider “L-shaped” option for school

At the second of two charrettes to discuss design alternatives for the school building project, residents considered the pros and cons of a modified proposal dubbed the “L-Shaped Plan” that would maintain the current footprint while demolishing and rebuilding the older portion of the Smith building.UpThe proposal retains the existing layouts for roadways, parking, and parent and bus drop-off locations, but it features a new cafeteria that would link the Brooks building to the Reed gym. It also includes a block of four new classrooms sited about where the southern half of the paved Brooks circle is now.

What the new proposal does not require is demolishing of the entire Smith building and building a new wing of 22 classrooms just south of the current Brooks entrance. Instead, it calls for keeping the southern half of the Smith wing, including the gym, while tearing down the older section and replacing it with new connecting space that would be slightly wider than the current structure.

[Read more…] about Modified school proposal discussed at charette

(Below is an unedited version of an email sent out to Lincoln School parents by the Lincoln PTO.)