Schools brace for busy summer construction season

With the funding firmly in place after last month’s annual town meeting, Canton school officials are now ready to move forward with several major capital projects over the next few months.

One such project — a four-room, permanent addition to the John F. Kennedy Elementary School — will get underway in late June with an expected completion date sometime in late September or early October.

In a report to the School Committee last Thursday, school business manager Ken Leon announced that a contract had been awarded to Seaver Construction of Woburn. Besides adding new classroom space to the existing structure, the company will also install a new building-wide sprinkler system in order to comply with a new state fire safety regulation.

To pay for the sprinkler system, Canton voters authorized an additional $364,000 at ATM 2011, bringing the total cost of the project to $1.26 million.

Although by no means a cure-all, the Kennedy project will serve to alleviate a space crunch that is currently most severe at the elementary schools. School officials had previously taken a hard look at some other options, such as building temporary (modular) classrooms or converting the Rodman building into a fourth elementary school; however, they settled on the JFK expansion as the most cost-effective and hassle-free alternative.

Meanwhile, school officials are still awaiting word from the Mass School Building Authority regarding possible grant funding for the JFK project, as well as for roof repairs at the Rodman Center ($347,000) and Canton High School ($294,000).

Both roof projects were tentatively approved at the recent town meeting, pending a decision from the MSBA. Leon said the status of the roof repair grants, estimated to be around $120,000 apiece, could be finalized by the end of May.

Leon also updated the committee on another major undertaking — replacement of the heating system at the Rodman building at an estimated cost of $1.5 million. Deemed a top priority, the project was originally the centerpiece of a larger performance contracting plan, which relies on long-term energy savings as the primary means to fund the repairs. Instead, Canton voters took the safer route and authorized the schools to finance the project through debt service.

Leon said the project has since gone out to bid, and of the eight designers who applied, four were granted interviews. He said negotiations with the top-rated designer were set to begin late last week.

As for other capital projects in the pipeline, the schools are set to move forward with a computer network overhaul that was approved as part of its FY12 cash capital budget at a cost of $211,000. Beginning this summer, all of the school system’s data and programs will be streamlined into a single, centralized network requiring just four servers, all of which will be managed from a single location. The current system, by comparison, utilizes 21 servers and relies on a separate domain for each of the five school buildings.

Once complete, all of the software on the new network will be “virtualized,” making it accessible to any school user via a log-in system from any device with an internet connection at any time. That means students would be able to access their school work — or any computer program available on the network — from their home computer or laptop, or even their cell phone.

Short URL: https://www.thecantoncitizen.com/?p=5244

Posted by Jay Turner on May 18 2011. Filed under News, Schools. Both comments and pings are currently closed.