Schools

Central High School District revamp is well under way

Posted

In each of the Bellmore-Merrick Central District’s five schools, students’ desks are now stacked in halls beside cardboard boxes full of textbooks and teachers’ knickknacks, and classrooms have been gutted.

Bellmore-Merrick is in the midst of the largest construction project that it has undertaken since its last school –– John F. Kennedy High in Bellmore –– was built in 1966.

Construction workers are busily rebuilding what they dismantled over the past month. The clock is ticking. Incoming seventh-graders will arrive for orientation at Grand Avenue and Merrick Avenue middle schools, and ninth-graders at Calhoun, Kennedy and Mepham high schools, on Aug. 31.

Central District officials insist that the schools will be ready for students in September. Workers are operating under a tight schedule, with daily assignments that are overseen by School Construction Consultants Inc., a building management team.

A $49.89 million bond, which voters passed on Dec. 2, 2013, is funding the project, which is being carried out in four phases.

The first phase –– installation of artificial-turf athletic fields and gymnasium floors at all five schools, along with bleacher and masonry work –– was completed in the 2014-15 school year.

Phase two, which includes new science laboratories, bathrooms, and music and guidance suites at the schools, among other projects, was supposed to start last summer. The projects, however, were delayed because the State Education Department did not approve them on time.

Now the Central District is compressing phases two and three, essentially a continuation of the second phase, into this summer.

In phase four, which will take place next summer and likely continue into 2017-18, the district will finish any work not completed this year.

Each school’s greatest needs are being addressed first. In the end, upgrades will be virtually the same at each school.

“It’s a huge project, said John DeTommaso, the Central District superintendent, during a tour of Calhoun High last Friday. “There’s a lot going on.”

When the revamp is complete, all five schools will be air-conditioned, including in their auditoriums. Previously, no building had air-conditioning.

John Simpkins, the district’s director of school facilities and operations, said that many of the old heating “unit ventilators did not operate properly.” Because many were too old, he said, parts could not be found for them. They are being replaced.

Additionally, with $1.4 million to $1.5 million in state funding, the district is incorporating a host of new technologies into the schools, including 165 state-of-the-art, flat-panel SmartBoards, 450 PCs, and 30 iPads and Chromebooks. The new hardware is to be distributed equally among the five schools and the Meadowbrook Alternative Program.

The district is also switching to a Cisco wireless network, which DeTommaso said will be more powerful than its current network. And it’s abandoning the eSchool portal, which allows parents and students to access records such as report cards and transcripts, in favor of Infinite Campus, which will eventually allow parents not only to check records, but also the daily and weekly grade books that their children’s teachers keep.

Calhoun High and Grand Avenue Middle School will also receive new roofs. And the district is adding a new broadcast journalism classroom at Mepham High and a new culinary arts classroom at Kennedy High. The broadcast and culinary arts classes will be magnet programs, open to all Central District students.

BBS Architects, Landscape Architects and Engineers of Patchogue did all of the design work.

Calhoun Principal Nicole Hollings said the reconstruction project “is just going to add to the learning environment and allow us to serve our students even better than before.”

Before the district began work recently, it had to receive a Moody’s rating, used to determine the interest rate that it must pay on the 18-year bond for the project. The district, DeTommaso said, earned a rating of Aa1, the highest available to a school system of its size. As a result, it received a 2 percent interest rate on the $42 million that it has borrowed to date. The district, however, had budgeted for a 4 or 5 percent interest rate. With the lower rate, it was able to reduce interest payments on the bond from $17 million to $7 million over the next two decades, DeTommaso said.

“We were ecstatic,” he said.

Originally, the bond was slated to cost local taxpayers $104 per year, or $8.67 per month.