Over the past several years, the North Shore Board of Education has undertaken many projects in an attempt to try and address residential concerns and improve the overall quality of life for students throughout the district. During the most recent board meeting on Oct. 24, members were presented with new proposals outlining the next steps for further improvements throughout the district.
Chris Zublionis, The Superintendent of the North Shore School District, came together with James Pappas, Assistant Superintendent of Business, and John Hall, Director of Facilities, to present the board with the next phase for improving the buildings and grounds throughout the district.
“Our board and the district has been so forward thinking over the last eight years in terms of preparing for the future, in thinking about what our schools need,” Zublionis said. “We are going to speak to you about the next phase and our thoughts on improving our buildings and grounds for the students in the North Shore schools, and we call this where they learn, play and grow.”
The presentation started with Zublionis highlighting the projects that the district has been able to complete in the past. He talked about the brand new turf field, the new gym floor, the work on the middle school lobby, and the latest work on the high school entrance, before transitioning into the need for this new phase of projects.
“So the question is, why now? One reason is new state mandates. There’s a bill sitting on Governor Hochul’s desk right now that would limit the max temp of classrooms to about 88 degrees, although we do have cooling in all of our schools there are some larger spaces such as the gyms that do not have cooling.” Zublionis said. “Another reason we have a couple of flat years here in terms of revenue loss until the 2027 28 school year. So this is the next couple of years. This is the time to start thinking about how we could accomplish some future projects, which would be difficult to do in that 2027 to 2030 time period.”
Zublionis then went into the financial aspect of these projects, talking about how much money is already budgeted for smaller projects and other ways to get money to take on some bigger projects for the school.
“We have several pieces that we can work with in a range of different ways,” Zublionis said. “One is the budgeted amount that we have every year for capital projects, the advantage of that, it’s already in the budget. The challenge is it can only accomplish small projects. Another piece is the falling off debt that I mentioned. If you combine that with this, now suddenly you have funds that could lead to bigger capital projects.”
Hall then joined Zublionis and Pappas to explain to the board some of the projects that they had thought were necessary for the next round of work on these buildings. They highlighted each building within the school districts and brought up ideas for the next phase for each.
“Some projects include, air conditioning in the gym and replacing the elevator at Glen Head schools, repairing the ceramic wall as well as air conditioning the gym at Glenwood Landing, replacing the building wide fire alarm and providing cooling to the auditorium and gymnasium in Sea Cliff schools, student locker and field renovations at the North Shore middle school, potential new lights for the field at the high school along with cooling for workshop and gym,” Zublionis said.
The floor was then opened to the members of the board to ask questions regarding the upcoming projects. David Lubnar, a member of the Board of Education, mentioned the idea of surveying families of the district to try and gauge the people’s reaction to these projects.
“If we could survey folks earlier and get a sense of where people stand, it might help us understand, wow, that’s a real quality of life issue for a large number of our people that maybe we need to address higher than we might think,” Lubnar said. “Certainly things like boilers, septic abatements, asphalt are certainly critical safety issues, But you also need to give people things to vote for and I think involving people early in this process as opposed to deciding on our own can be beneficial.”
Although this was just pitching the new ideas to the board, Zublionis said that he hopes to bring up a finalized project list to the meeting next month with hopes to get some construction steering in December.
“A rough timeline would be to get a more solid concept of a funding plan next month to work towards a refined project list with construction steering in December, share that again with the board, before going out to the public in January for feedback sessions. This is a very fast track timeline. It could be stretched out longer, of course,” Zublionis said.
