June 11, 2002 - Baltimore City Public Schools

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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. file://S:\CMS_Content\meetings\2002\J11_02.html 9/23/2002
Board Meeting Minutes MS. WELCH: Mr. Streuver? MR. STREUVER: I'd like to start by saying -- because I'm going to say some things that are going to reflect some deep concerns about our capital funding and plan. But the SET context -- the reason I'm so concerned is we've done such a fantastic job over the last two years of focusing our thinking on our educational program, as it relates to the facilities, that we deliver a great education for all of our students. So it's really that hard work that I know all of you have been very involved in; working late nights, Saturdays and weekends. Colene Daniel is the Chair of the Facilities Committee. And it's a huge amount of work. And it's really the, I guess, the brilliance of that whole effort that -- it turned on a light bulb for me, because I counted facilities as facilities. You know, the whole notion has kind of declined in our Facility Utilization Plan right now. I've become totally convinced that we're not going to succeed with what we want to do educationally unless we deal with facilities in a major way. So without that enthusiasm for what all of you, together, have put before us, at least to me, to -- it's a deep frustration with where we are with facilities. A big part of this is the issue of capacity. We've talked about this repeatedly. I remain unconvinced that we are taking the steps to even increasing for the planning staff from six to four, that we are -- four to six, is that what it is? Six to ten, I believe it is. We've got a long ways to go, recognizing to run a qualify smart, major, facilities project is a lot of effort and time. I think we've learned that from the new Southern project, which really is going quite quickly. It's a massive project. And each one of those projects has a full-time, high-quality project manager. And if we want to do everything that we say we want to do, we don't have the horses to do it yet. And we need to get much more serious about figuring out how we're going to build capacity. And part of it's around planning. We talk about our need to work on our community planning abilities. We've had our heads handed to us on too many occasions when we've not been nimble enough in working with the community surrounding our schools, for the locations where we want to locate schools. That's a whole major effort in itself. And including the educational program coordination that, I think, Colene talked about. It's just so hugely important. We're not designing buildings. We're creating delightful environments that makes good education happen. In relate of that is our A&E selection process. If we don't have a process that takes, essentially, engineers that have done 500 schools, we're not going to end up with the kind of facility that we saw in Atlanta, at Centennial Village. You know, just inspiring to walk into. If we want world-class buildings, we really need to think about how we go about a selection process. And this leads to, if we're going to achieve what we want to achieve, we've got to get more projects in the pipeline, better managed and better supported, because those projects are ready to go. We'll find the money. Create some pressure onto itself. If projects are ready to go, we end up where we've been every year in the System, as we don't spend the money that's available to us. The reason why we're only getting -- one of the reasons we're only getting $13 million from the State this year, which is less than 10 percent of the State's school construction budget, a lower percentage than we've seen since this Board's been in place, even with the cut in overall State funding, if we don't have projects ready to go. And the only reason we have any substantial money at all is because of our work, and Carmen Russo and others, to get Southern High, you know, jammed through the pipeline so it was ready to go under construction, or else we'd have a whole lot less than $13 million from the State. So we've got to figure out a way to accelerate the planning. I'm very disappointed that there's no money for Steuart Hill for planning this year. How do you do the work next summer if you don't plan it? This year you need to hire somebody to plan it. It needs to be in the budget. MR. SMOLARZ: It is on the pre-K to 8 conversion. Page 25 of 41 MR. STREUVER: So we are doing that? Well, we've got Violetville pushed out. If you really think it's important, let's plan it. It's our own money. We have money available to us this year to hire a quality design team and hire a quality project manager. Let's take those projects, that would convince me to have, and plan them, so that they're ready to go and the money's available. I can't wait to see the special report on libraries and HVAC. You know, we're dying to see it. My heart goes out to these 46,000 file://S:\CMS_Content\meetings\2002\J11_02.html 9/23/2002
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June 11, 2002 - Baltimore City Public Schools

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