School Com looking at Coakley $10M leftovers

The Norwood School Committee met on Wednesday in a hybrid meeting format and discussed the remaining $10,600,089 in the account for the Coakley Middle School.

Norwood Public Schools (NPS) Superintendent Tim Luff said the Middle School Building Committee (MSBC) recently approved some further spending of $500,000, so that number will be a little lower. But the fact remains that there is leftover funding.

Even with all the issues the Coakley currently has (and that the MSBC and NPS are compelling the contractor to fix), it is expected that about $9 million to $10 million will be left over. If that money is not directed towards the Coakley building, those funds will go back into the capital fund for Town Meeting to dispense or reallocate. “So we were fighting over how much for our (buildings maintenance) feasibility study?” asked School Committee member Joan Giblin. “Could we use some of the funds for the feasibility study?” Luff said that is not the case. The study is $150,000 to look at all the NPS schools and what maintenance is needed and when. It’s been submitted by the School Committee three times previously and has been passed over by the Capital Outlay Committee (COC) and is now on November’s Town Meeting Warrant for free cash. The COC had a lot of internal argument about its inclusion, and Giblin seemed to think the Coakley funds could be a way out of that.

Luff said, however, that the March 2022 Town Meeting Warrant releasing the funds for the project originally was very specific about how they should be used. “I did discuss that with Brian Jarvis, who is our (Overall Project Manager) Vertex Representative, and it all goes down to what the warrant article said at Town Meeting, and the Warrant Article said the funds have to be spent clearly specific to the building of the Coakley Middle School,” Luff said.

The warrant specifically reads “an amount of money to be expended under the direction of the Middle School Building Committee for the costs of construction, demolition, equipment, furnishings, site work, testing, professional services, including design and engineering, and relocation costs at the New Coakley Middle School.”

Luff said if they spent any of that money not on the school, it wouldn’t work. But Giblin said they might as well look at what could be done to decrease maintenance costs in the future at the building, since they have that money left over.

When the building was first being designed, the MSBC engineered out a good deal of features at the school to cut costs because of the inflation and supply chain issues going on in the 2022-23 period.

“So I know, for example, we reduced the amount of tile by how far up the wall the tile went,” Giblin said. “That seems like such a basic thing, but tile is a hell of a lot more durable than drywall. So I’m wondering if we can roll things like that back in, with (Norwood Townwide Facilities Department Director Christopher) Folan’s advice, for things that will help us avoid maintenance in the future on that building… If kids hit drywall, they go right through it, if they hit tile, they bounce off.”

Luff said he was sympathetic to the idea, but said it would have been easier to have done it when all the vendors were still on the project.

“So that would be something we would have to allocate those funds for and have our folks do,” he said. “Once the project’s closed out, I don’t know if that money can linger.” Giblin said she wanted to see if the School Committee would be amenable to getting a warrant article together to try to separate some of those funds for preventative maintenance on the building to get the most longevity out of it. She said the priority would be what was first included in the project and then value engineered out to save money at the time.

“It’s not that I don’t want to give money back for other capital projects, it’s that I know we made decisions that we’re going to be paying for five or 10 years down the line, and I’d like to not do that while we have this money here,” Giblin said.

School Committee member Ben Moser said as the chair of the School Committee Budget Subcommittee, he will bring it there for further discussion and a possible warrant for May Town Meeting.

In other news, Facilities Director Chris Folan gave the School Committee an update on his department’s work throughout the summer. Folan’s main work was prepping and moving the Willett Elementary School, which is transitioning from the Willett Early Education Center district-wide kindergarten to a regular elementary school. “Two of the busiest summers we’ve had have been moving the old high school to the new high school and moving the Coakley to the new Coakley, and this summer ranks definitely as the third busiest,” he said.

The transition came because of the Coakley Middle School, ostensibly. The new building allowed for a reorganization of space, and the School Committee voted to move the fifth grade to the Coakley and rearrange the elementary schools. In that process, it was decided to spread the kindergartens out to the elementary schools and turn the Willett into an elementary school. He said there was a lot of furniture that needed to be moved for all the new aged children coming in.

“So we got all the stuff moved out of the Willett, and at the same time they moved the truck out of the Willett, they came back from the elementary schools with their stuff. We staged it all in the gym and it just kept going. It only took a couple of days, and thankfully it was only 95 degrees, 90 percent humidity, it rained one of the days. It was a lot of work that these guys did.” Folan said all the school furniture was centrally located in the gym while painting and reflooring were done, and then the moving company came and distributed [furniture] to all the classrooms,” he said.

Back to the Coakley, Folan said the state sent an inspector to look over the school’s progress.

“We walked them around the building and we knew when the bells were going to ring, and we told them they had to move to the side or get run over,” he said. “And it was organized chaos to say the least... But the comments that the people from the Inspector General’s office made were like, ‘Everybody’s happy. The teachers are happy, the kids are happy, it’s just a good place.’”