June 11, 2002 - Baltimore City Public Schools

Board Meeting Minutes
Page 24 of 41
to about $30 million, to be consistent in what we believed the educational requirement is and what the
facility would require. Violetville, pre-K to 8, we submitted in FY '03. Did not get that approved. As the
former Mayor and Governor Schaefer indicated, it is a 72-year-old building that needs to be renovated.
Again, with money the way it is, we've pushed that back somewhat, because we think some of the other
programs, the educational requirements, are needed before this project began. This is a very difficult
task of trying to prioritize which projects need to be renovated first. Cherry Hill, pre-K to 8. Again,
Cherry Hill is the oldest elementary school in that community, over 50 years old, and we're going to
need to renovate, from a facilities standpoint. We need to also renovate it to become an effective pre-K
to 8 school. And, in fact, further down, you'll see the next one. One that is pre-K to 8 as well. We also
believe, as Councilman Stoots believes, that the population growth in Cherry Hill will be such that we
will need to have more capacity in that community. Again, we have some other projects listed there on
the out years. I won't go into detail because they are, at least, three years down the road. But you get a
sense of our need. And we could probably reel off another dozen or so projects that really could be
substituted for any of these, because of the conditions at those schools. Moving to the next page, and the
last page before we entertain questions, is the area of Miscellaneous. And I don't would to po-po
miscellaneous. When you hear miscellaneous, a lot of times you don't give it a lot of attention. But
systemic is very important to us. And what we mean by systemic are the boilers, the chillers, the roofs,
the air conditioning, the science labs, the windows. Those are items that if we do enough of those for a
school, maybe you don't need a full-blown renovation. But, again, our need here is so great. One of the
things that Mr. Vincent is assisting us with is really taking a look at all our schools. And I'll use roofs as
an example, being a roofer's son. A useful life of a roof is, roughly, 20 to 25 years. So on any given year,
you would need to do seven roofs. Any given year. I think we all know we haven't been doing seven
roofs every single year. But if we got to the point where we were up to date, this is what the normal
preventive maintenance is, as I said, you need to do seven roofs, you need to do seven boilers, you need
to do seven chillers. You need to do windows probably -- you probably don't need to wait 25 years.
Probably every 15 years. So it's that kind of preventive maintenance that really costs a lot more than the
numbers that I'm showing here. Again, we're trying to kill an elephant with a pop gun. Asbestos
abatement. Those numbers are there. Again, it's part of renovations. We need to update asbestos. The
pre-K to 8 conversions, as the Board had approved back on -- in February, converting a lot of our
schools from pre-K to 8. That will cost dollars. We've anticipated, roughly, $6 million in '03. And that
number will decline over the next couple of years as we add science labs and the other type of
educational items that are needed to convert those schools to pre-K to 8. The next one I'll spend a minute
on, because, again, this is an area that's been long ignored. This is our equipment. And by equipment,
I'm talking about equipment in the kitchens of our schools, and I'm talking about the equipment that our
facilities staff and transportation staff have to use every single day. And in this past year -- I was very
gratified yesterday at the staff meeting when the managers, the guys in the trenches, said, you know,
Mark, having those vehicles has increased our productivity two-fold or three-fold. He said it's nice to
know that we have the vehicles to jump in and get a crew out to the school when we get a call from a
principal to say, can you guys come by and clean up the school? Can you guys come by and fix this
door? And having the vehicles, which we didn't have before, has really helped us. But that's just a first
step. We don't have a mechanical sweeper. We have one cherry picker in the whole System. And by
cherry picker, something that we can go up and repair lights, like in the gyms. And I know a lot of times
we talk about the lights in the gym are out. And, again, you need equipment to get those lights lit in the
gyms, 170 gyms. We have one graffiti truck. So it's those kinds of equipment and lack of equipment that
really impairs or handicaps our facilities staff in doing their job. So we're going to make a commitment
on the equipment side to help not only facility kitchen equipment -- our kitchen's been around for 20, 30
years, and it's on its last leg. We're putting some dollars in there as well. And then we have a line for
contingencies, because things happen, and so we have some money tucked away for those emergencies
that happen that we haven't considered otherwise. So we wanted to present this to you to get your
feedback as we finalize our Facility Master Plan, and to help us in the CIP submission for FY '04. Thank
you.
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9/23/2002