The Harvard schools are seeking approval of three warrant articles at Annual Town Meeting, one of which will also have to be approved at Town Election. All the measures are for capital improvements to the schools’ physical plant—an up-to-date telephone system for all three buildings; renovated bathrooms at the Hildreth Elementary School; and an improved air-exchange system for the science labs at the Bromfield School.
Elementary school
bathrooms are in bad shape
The first of these votes that Town Meeting will take is also the least expensive and the easiest to explain. Article 20 calls for using $30,000 from the Capital Stabilization and Investment Fund to renovate the 1980s bathrooms at the elementary school. (These are not the 1950s bathrooms in the kindergarten wing; those cannot be renovated because opening the walls could release harmful mold spores.)
The four bathrooms to be renovated have seen around 2.5 million person-days of use in their quarter-century lifetimes. They look bad and smell worse. The flooring is made of ceramic tile, with badly stained grout around every urinal in the boys’ rooms. Every sink has a gaping hole at its corner where a soap dispenser used to be. Heating units range from slightly to totally rusted. Some stall partitions are rickety. Ventilation is inadequate or nonexistent.
HES Principal Sue Frederick said early this week that the top priority is to replace the flooring with the same easily cleanable type of vinyl tile that has worn well in the school hallways. This tile can be sealed and has no porous grout around it. The next item on the list is to replace the old toilets and sinks.
“We have a big punch list with a small amount of money,” Associate Principal Gretchen Henry said, referring to the $30,000 warrant article. But she said school administrators also hoped to replace some of the rusty heaters and add ventilation.
New phone system
would connect all three buildings
Article 21 asks voters to approve $100,000—also from the Capital Stabilization Fund—for a new, VOIP (voice over Internet protocol) telephone system to connect both schools and the administration office in Bromfield House.
Right now, if Bromfield Principal Jim O’Shea wants to call Superintendent Linda Dwight, he has to dial the Bromfield House number on an outside line, wait for the recorded message, and then dial her extension. All calls must go through outside lines. It’s inefficient and inconvenient, but perhaps not in itself reason enough to replace the phone system.
More problematic, according to Technical Director Chris Boyle, is that the Bromfield School phone system is at the end of its life. It is no longer manufactured, making it increasingly difficult to get repair parts. It is also at full capacity, making it too expensive to add new phones, Boyle said. And because the supplier, Signet, manages the system, every change requires a costly service call.
The elementary school phone system is also showing its age. The biggest problem there, both Boyle and Dwight said, was that announcements from the principal’s office are barely audible in the classrooms. Announcements come through on the classroom speaker phone, and even at top volume they can’t be heard when children are reading aloud, working in groups, or moving around.
A new VOIP system, Boyle said, would provide speaker boxes in each HES classroom, so that everyone could hear office communications, which might be either run-of-the-mill or urgent alerts.
All the administrators stressed the value of the VOIP system in an emergency. Teachers could call 911 directly from any classroom. Even more important, emergency responders would know exactly what room the call came from.
Science lab ventilation system
requires ballot-box approval
All three articles require a two-thirds vote at Town Meeting. But Article 23, which calls for a capital exclusion of $185,000, will also require a majority vote at Town Election on April 7. The full cost of the project to the town, combining the capital exclusion with ordinary revenue, would total $315,000. Any cost beyond that amount will be made up by the schools, from a source such as the Shaw Trust.
The current ventilation system in the Bromfield science labs was judged inadequate when the school was evaluated in 2012 by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges. The antiquated system exchanges air throughout the building only twice in one hour. Newer labs, such as those recently constructed in the Maynard, Hudson, and Ayer-Shirley high schools, exchange the air at three times that rate: six times per hour.
For more information, see the following article: http://bit.ly/1EqnLCj.
