State Kills West Woods School Rebuilding Project

After decades of leaky ceilings and floor puddles, students and teachers at the West Woods School in Hamden will have to wait even longer for any long-term fixes.

This week, the state notified Superintendent Jody Goeler that it has rescinded its grant to the town to pay for the construction of a new West Woods School, because the town missed the Oct. 31 deadline to begin construction.

The state also stipulated that the town must address structural needs of the building, and has indicated that it may still help with renovations to do so. Town officials said they still hope to fix major issues over the coming summer, and to make all necessary improvements one way or another.

In 2016, the town approved bonding to construct a new school on the same property as the existing one, and the state later approved a grant that would pay for $15 million of the $26 million project. At the same time, it approved a grant application for renovations at the Alice Peck School.

The state has a two-year deadline to begin construction after a grant application is approved. Goeler said that the district applied for extensions on both the Alice Peck and West Woods projects. The state approved the extension for Alice Peck, where construction is just getting under way, but not for West Woods.

“The community was not prepared,” said Connecticut Office of School Construction Grants and Review (OSCG&R) Director Konstantinos Diamantis about the West Woods project.

The West Woods construction project was one piece of a number of school renovation projects that the town has planned. Hamden originally got grants to renovate West Woods, Alice Peck, and the Shepherd Glen School. The Board of Education then decided to roll those projects into a larger, districtwide restructuring project called the 3R Project that would involve changes at every school in the district except for the high school. In November of 2018, the board approved the project, which involves closing the Shepherd Glen and the Church Street schools, bringing sixth graders to the middle school, instituting universal pre-K, incorporating the Wintergreen School building into the district, and creating intra-district magnet schools in order to bring racial balance at elementary schools into compliance with a state statute. (Read more about the project here and here.)

In his letter to Goeler, Diamantis said that the state is still supporting the Alice Peck renovation project, and that it will put the addition of a 6th-grade wing at the middle school on its 2020 priority list, meaning it will likely approve that grant application. The letter indicated that the state will no longer support construction of a new West Woods School, and that renovations at the Ridge Hill School and Wintergreen School will not make the 2020 priority list.

Diamantis said that his office intends to have the town proceed with the middle school and Alice Peck projects first, and then West Woods and Ridge Hill will follow, but don’t need to happen before the middle school.

The West Woods project has been plagued by delays. It originally made the state’s 2017 priority list after the town applied for grant funding in 2016, and the grant was approved in 2017. However, around the same time, the state indicated that it wanted the district to go back and come up with a strategic plan for the whole district that would outline all future construction needs, and then bring it to the state.

The state, said Diamantis, asked Hamden to “bring us a comprehensive plan of what their district will look like.” The BOE then began to develop the 3R Project. The districtwide plan would address facility needs and at the same time adapt the district to decreasing enrollment and bring the it into compliance with a state racial balancing statute. The West Woods project was rolled into the 3R Project, and planning the whole 3R Project, which now included West Woods, delayed construction.

This past summer, the town received a cost estimate from Fusco, the construction manager for the project. While the town had planned, and bonded, for a $26 million project, Fusco said the project would actually cost $33 million. Over the course of the summer, said School Building Committee Chair and BOE Secretary Myron Hul, the architect and the town had to work on altering the project to reduce the cost, which delayed the project further. They managed to reduce the project cost from $33 million to $29 million, he said.

Because of these delays, the town still had not begun construction by the state’s Oct. 31 deadline.

Setback Or Opportunity?

Though the town will no longer build a new West Woods School — at least not in the time frame it had planned — it will still undergo renovations. And ultimately, those renovations may end up being closer to what the district wanted in the first place.

In his letter to Goeler, Diamantis wrote that the construction of a new school is canceled, but that “the District shall address water intrusion issues if the building is to be occupied during the planning of a new renovated school. The District shall (1) identify water intrusion problems/sources, (2) identify systems which are failing or absent, and (3) identify remediation strategies and meet with OSCG&R.”

At a meeting of the West Woods PTA Wednesday evening, Goeler explained that the town had originally gone to the state intending to renovate the school. The state replied that the town should instead build an entirely new school because the existing one is too big.

“The state actually said… ‘we won’t support a renovation. Build a new school,’” said Goeler.

Connecticut has a standard square footage per student for schools. West Woods is currently 86,000 square feet, said Hul. According to the state’s per-student square footage guidelines, it should only be 55,000 square feet, so the state requested that the town build a new, smaller school rather than renovate the existing school.

Goeler, however, said that renovating the existing school might actually be a better outcome after all. He and the district had wanted to renovate the school in the first place, not build a new one, he said. He said that he and many others didn’t actually like the plans for the new school.

“It wasn’t as nice a building as the building we have,” he said. “It had been so value-engineered it looked more like a prison than a school.” It would have been much smaller, with narrower hallways than the current school has.

As Diamantis’s letter indicated, the district will need to identify water intrusion problems and other needs and then meet with the state.

Goeler said he plans to meet with the OSCG&R within the next few weeks to plan fixes to the school, and he hopes to have the studies the state has asked for completed by then. He said that he will tell them that he’s aware they did not like the idea of renovating the school, but that fixes cannot wait any longer. Ideally, he said, the state will help fund renovations on the existing school that will take place in waves occurring over the next few summers.

The first round of renovations may be able to take place this summer. While a full-school renovation project would need to make the state’s priority list, and would therefore have to be approved by the state legislature, certain individual renovations are considered “non-priority list” projects. These projects do not have to be approved by the legislature, and can simply be authorized directly by the OSCG&R. Projects eligible for this category are those that aim to “remedy damage from fire and catastrophe, to correct safety, health and other code violations, to replace roofs, to remedy a certified school indoor air quality emergency, or to purchase and install portable classroom buildings.”

Hamden will try to get funding for non-priority list projects for the summer of 2020, said district Chief Operating Officer Tom Ariola. Those might include getting a new roof, HVAC system, and security system, among other fixes. If further fixes are required, the town could apply for priority-list-project funding for the following summer. He said that, though the renovations will not need to be a $29 million project, they will still need to be of a large enough scale to address all the needs of the school, and not just provide stopgap solutions.

For renovations, Hamden gets a reimbursement rate from the state of about 67 percent.

“It’s kind of exciting that we potentially have this opportunity,” said Lauren Garrett, who serves on the Legislative Council and the School Building Committee. She said that the school is ​“really loved,” but that it just needs to be renovated to make it safe.

Members of the PTA did not seem to mind that the school will likely be renovated rather than entirely rebuilt. Some said they were happy that they will get to keep their school.

“In my opinion, the safety and security of our children is more important than whether we have a new school or renovations,” said PTA Secretary Jennifer Schmitz.

Many members of the PTA said they are frustrated that the project, which has taken many years already, will now be delayed further. Schmitz said she was having these same conversations when her daughter was in kindergarten. She’s now a seventh grader. The ceiling leaks, as do the floors, she said, and some bathrooms don’t work anymore.

“What can you tell us that will give us hope that we won’t be here at this time next year?” asked PTA member Justin Thomas. He, like many other members of the PTA, said he is tired of hearing the same explanations over and over again from officials about delays. It’s time for new ideas and a new approach, he said.