The Massachusetts School Building Authority gave final approval Wednesday for Harvard to move ahead with a feasibility study for renovations at Hildreth Elementary School. HES was one of only three schools to receive approval from the building authority at this time, allowing the HES study to move ahead without delay. (The other two schools were in Arlington and Tisbury.)
“We are committed to working with these districts to help solve the problems identified at these schools,” said Maureen Valente, chief executive officer of the building authority in a press release about the decision.
“The importance of making the May deadline,” Superintendent Linda Dwight wrote in an email, “is that we are able to proceed with hiring the OPM (Owner’s Project Manager), which is the first step in a process. After hiring the OPM, we move into hiring the design team that will conduct the feasibility study.”
School Building Committee member Ron Ostberg emphasized that expediting the process is important for controlling costs, too. “We were pushing this to go as fast as we could,” he said by phone, “because they [the MSBA] only meet every so often. … There is a trend that the longer you take to do something, the more it’s going to cost.”
The School Building Committee has to hold the project to a tight schedule so as to have cost estimates ready to bring to the town for funding by early 2018. “We are working backwards from a spring 2018 deadline for Town Meeting,” Dwight wrote.
