Costs decrease for St. Charles District 303 middle school work
St. Charles school officials feared the $50 million they cobbled together to renovate middle schools might not be enough to get the job done. But construction bids that the school board will vote on Monday are so favorable, officials will tack on a few bells and whistles.
Before the bids, district staff members crafted a budget for all the work and materials. It came to a total of $49,897,000. On Monday, the school board will vote on bids that would put the costs at $47,037,000.
That new total still includes a $2.5 million contingency for unforeseen expenses, representing a savings of $2.86 million.
The largest cost savings is in the construction at Thompson Middle School. The low base bid of $34.8 million will allow the school board to tack on about $1.9 million in wish-list items to the project.
The big-ticket item on that list is a $935,000 underground stormwater storage area at Thompson. The expense will prevent the need to create a 200-by-250-foot pond. The pond would reach a depth of 9 feet on the northwest corner of the campus, adjacent to Main Street.
"It's an expensive add, but it is certainly one that changes the look and the safety of that area," Superintendent Don Schlomann explained.
Thompson also will receive a facelift on its parking lots, new exterior steps, acoustic doors in the orchestra and band areas to prevent noise leakage into classrooms, porcelain tile in the corridors to enhance durability, and aluminum stair rails. The stairwells will also be all precast, increasing their life span.
Two areas of Thompson's existing roof will also be replaced, a project that adds $741,000 in costs. Schlomann explained those sections of the roof had a life span that reached only 2020.
"One of the things we didn't want to have is a situation where we just finished this building and now we're putting new roofs on," Schlomann said. "People would be asking, 'What are we doing?'"
One yet-to-be-determined enhancement is the possible addition of glass marker boards. The original plan called for the boards in every classroom of the new Thompson. But the district staff pulled those boards after discovering they cost $350,000.
"The administration felt like that's a big number to say that you can write on the classroom walls," Schlomann said.
The nearly floor-to-ceiling boards will be part of the new science classrooms at Wredling, which was a separate bid. Schlomann said the administration didn't look at the costs of those boards for Wredling because the relatively few boards didn't create a big number that caught anyone's attention.
But Schlomann warned there could be a perceived disparity problem going forward if the school board doesn't at least go with the glass board for the science rooms at Thompson as well.
"It's going to create pressure from the other schools," Schlomann said. "Once you see these boards, they look cool. So they'll want that in the other schools."
Board members said they may look at adding the glass boards to Thompson's science rooms later into the project when they have a better feel for any unexpected costs.
District officials have not yet said what they will do with any money leftover at the conclusion of all the work.