HANOVER — There’s no construction price tag available yet, but South Shore Tech Building Committee heard updates on the feasibility study toward a renovation project or completely new building during its Thursday, Sept. 7 meeting.
Project Manager Jen Carlson of LeftField, a Boston firm that specializes in project management and Carl R. Franceschi, president of architectural firm Drummer Roxane Anderson Inc. (DRA) of Waltham made the presentation.
Alternative options for the project took up the lion’s share of the meeting, while will be completed this month.
“We will have some ballpark figures based on narrative and square footage [at a joint School Committee/Building Committee meeting Thursday, Oct. 5],” Carlson said. “They will definitely flux, going forward, but they are a tool to compare options against each other when we move into the next phase.”
A virtual public forum will also be held on the PDP Oct. 5.
“We will push that out so the larger community is aware,” Superintendent/Director Dr. Thomas J. Hickey said, noting there will be other public forums held through December.
Before that meeting, the School Committee will have to vote on the preliminary design program [PDP], planned on Wednesday, Sept 20, as will Building Committee meeting again on Thursday, Sept. 28. Building Committee might want to give feedback in a joint meeting Sept. 20.
That does give us some wiggle room,” Carlson said. A second round of public forums will invite community feedback on the final design in April and May 2024.
“As you might imagine, the forums this fall are going to be about issues, ‘Should we renovate this building? Should we build new?’ — very high-level discussions,” Franceschi said. “But by next spring, we’ll have focused on one preferred option and, people may still have issues in their mind, but the meaningful input will be on the one design we’re working on.” [See related story]
“We haven’t quite quantified the price, but we’ve quantified the size,” he said.
About a year behind Whitman’s middle school project in the Massachusetts School Building Authority approval process, SST is still in the feasibility stage, having spent $248,500 so far of $2 million budgeted for that purpose. Carlson said $1.4 million has been committed to date — representing 76 percent of the project’s budget.
“We still have plenty to pull from the environmental and site line item,” Carlson said, noting that another line item had been pulled from for budget transfers, putting the total spent so far at $248,500. “Our total spent to date represents 12 percent of the budget.”
A total of $84,000 has been invoiced on the project so far, including $29,000 for Left Field’s services for the month of August and DRA’s second invoice of $55,000 for the same period.
The building committee unanimously approved the budget update. The committee unanimously approved those expenditures, as well.
The study presented three possible deigns if the committee opts to do a complete rebuild, and two potential renovation plans — all based on a student body of 805 students, with the recent addition of Marshfield to the district. But Franceschi, noted there are also ways to design for 900 or 975 students. From the lowest to the highest student population figure, there is a difference of 40,000 square feet to consider in planning.
“We need to show the building could be expanded in the future, too. They aways want to see that at the state level, but we don’t want to see a situation where we’d be talking about expansion in five years,” he said. “Projects we’re estimating right now – just in the construction costs alone – are somewhere in the vicinity of $800 per square foot with sitework and building.”
It could add at least $30 million to the plan to base it on 975 students.
The condition report on the school highlights the wetlands on the site as well as the drainpipe that runs across the athletic fields, “just to highlight some of the constraints that we’re dealing with,” Franceschi said. “We’re updating those wetland flags and we will be in conversation with the Conservation Commission soon, too, before we even design anything, just to get their understanding and agreement that, ‘Yes, these are the limits of the wetlands’ so that everybody’s working with the same information.”
Massachusetts allows filling up to 5,000 square feet of wetlands, but it would have to be replicated somewhere else, sometimes as much as a 2:1 ratio.
Financial ideas
Whitman representative on the School Committee and building panel Dan Salvucci asked if it would be possible to create a curriculum program for horticulture students on working with wetlands regulations as a way toward obtaining funding.
Hickey said there could be an opportunity there.
“We use our campus as our curriculum,” he said. “This is just another way.”
Franceschi said the athletic fields are also topographically lower than the school and close to groundwater. A conventional Title 5 septic system at the front of the property now serves the school, with a “high probability” that a wastewater treatment plant and leaving field would have to be included on another area of the property.
The plans would also need to highlight how spaces meet current educational standards, not just in relation to the condition of spaces, but size. With Marshfield already having joined the district, he said designers have agreed internally that the design, at minimum should fit about 805 students.
“We’re trying to get the state to agree,” he said. “It’s a little variable in the shops, because we have to project what the enrollment would be in each shop, and it’s not a hard and fast number just yet, but we’re close enough that we could do this kind of a calculation.”
DRA has, in fact calculated that there is a high-level need to expand the building.
Salvucci asked if adding a second floor in some areas might be an option.
“We don’t consider it practical to put a second floor on the existing building,” Franceschi said. “We’re thinking multiple stories to the new construction or addition portions of the building, or maybe even demolishing part of the existing building and building multiple stories, but not building on top of what’s here.”
Safety issues
While it could be done, it’s too complicated because the building couldn’t be safely occupied while a new story is being added above. In 40 years in the industry, Franeschi said he has not added additional floors to an existing building yet.
“You don’t really have small group spaces, collaborative spaces that we see and desire in schools nowadays,” Franceschi said. “Teacher planning spaces are kind of not up to par for what you’d want. The science labs are another one that would have to be increased in size to meet space standards.”
Where science lab standards are 1,400 square feet today, SST’s labs are 800 square feet.
How the school’s educational plan and programs are to be organized was another consideration in the preliminary plans DRA and LeftField reviewed with the committee. In developing the plan, the district identified six possible new programs they would ideally like to include.
“In all of these things, and independent of whether it’s going to be an addition or renovation, or new construction, in a way we and the state kind of uses the education plan to measure against our proposed solution,” Franceschi said. “That’s why the education plan is an important guideline for all of us.”
They’ve already moved nine administrative offices, and the parking spaces that go along with them, including Hickey’s, to a house next door to the school purchased and renovated by the district. Cafeteria staff who park in front of the school are done for the day by 1 p.m.
“Parent pick-up has been much more pronounced since the pandemic,” he said, so making room for that traffic has been a priority, although the data is not available to support that observation.’
At first, Hickey said, he thought a renovation would be a lot cheaper than brand-new. But it’s not. To bring a 1962 building up to code entails some unpleasant surprises.
Carlson also walked the committee through a schedule and budget update.
“The scope of this [budget] amendment includes a visual inspection of the hazardous building materials —looking for hazardous building materials and identifying them,” she said. “This will include a report identifying the hazardous materials and then estimate services … of what the [cost] of removing hazardous materials might be.”
The work on a first draft is expected to be completed this month and costs are in line with the costs decided in the PRA contract.
The schedule provides a “zoomed-in look” and what to expect between now and the submission of the schematic design to MSBA in December.
The preliminary design program (PDP) will be the first submission to MSBA, scheduled for Oct. 5 — including a conditions evaluation, educational visioning, a draft educational plan, initial space summary (spaces aligned with the educational plan), an evaluation of alternative options and comparative cost estimates.
Next phase
The next phase — the preferred schematic report (PSR) — will feature a more detailed review of the PDP options, including a final education plan and the preferred design option based on three enrollment options, as well as and creation of a matrix of priorities and will be submitted to the MSBA on Dec. 28 in time for a vote on their approval two months later. Another, more refined, set of cost estimates will be made at this time, according to Carlson.
“Once you submit that PSR, then we’re into the schematic design phase and them it’s full steam ahead, developing that one [preferred] option,” she said.
After the two-month MSBA review, there is a meeting with the MSBA before officially submitting the final schematic design on Wednesday, Feb. 28, 2024.
The final submission is due to MSBA by Thursday, June 27, 2024, including the final design program and total project budget.
“By the end of June, we’ll have some really good numbers that are reliable and that we need to live within for the rest of this project,” she said.

WHITMAN – The Whitman Middle School Building Committee sat down to crunch the numbers on how they might trim the new school plans in an effort to make the price tag more affordable to voters, but – in the end, the committee was split in its decision, but the majority agreed to stick with the original decision.
“Whatever the number we set today, if we set a number today and we go forward to the MSBA, that’s the highest number the MSBA’s ever going to participate in,” owner’s project manager Mike Carroll said. “We’re above the cap on most of this anyway, so we’re really talking mostly town money when we get to discussions about the options here.”
A problem in finding places to cut lies in the efficiency of the school’s design, he noted.
“They know where the low-hanging fruit is and they’ve already picked many of those,” he said.
Base repair
Carroll said, as an example under a basic repair they would not be replacing all the windows, improving outside problems such as driveways or code upgrades the work would trigger.
“You’re bringing the building up to energy code as you can, but it’s within an existing building, so you’re not going to get as you would on a full gut/renovation or a brand-new building,” Carroll said.
The base repair is not a renovation or addition, it’s actually less than that, Carroll said.
It would not address potholes or other problems in the parking lot, either. Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and new fire code update requirements, based on the building’s assessed value, would also be triggered with base repair, affecting building entrances, floors and ceilings, bathrooms, railings and stairs as well as sprinkler and electrical systems under a three-year window.
Committee member Beth Stafford said space needed for students is also not included, nor the cost of portable classrooms that would be needed.
“This is the take-home message for me,” Finance Committee representative Kathleen Ottina said. “There’s no discussion among the members of this committee that we need a new middle school,” she said.
Ottina said she wanted to reframe the discussion to consider their options – would the committee want to stay with the project, eliminate some costs to reduce it at level one through contingencies and soft costs, eliminate the auditorium and downsize the gym or change from grades five to eight back to six to eight.
“We can go through all sorts of budget discussions and what we should have known, what we wish we knew then back in January, that’s not going to get us where we need to go tonight, which is what building are we going to support?” she said. “I don’t think any of us have a real finger on the pulse of the voter in Whitman to say, ‘This is the way forward.’”
She argued the question is can the Committee justify supporting a building that will meet the needs of our current middle school children and the middle school children going to the next many decades.
Carroll described the effect of each tier:
Tier 1
Doesn’t substantially change the building, or the educational program and does not affect the building operations, but it does impact the district’s risk profile both at acceptable levels in the opinion of the architect and owner’s project manager. The average cost is $770 per square foot. Some possible reductions are:
Reducing the total contingency from 9 percent to 7 percent, saving the town about $2.1 million — $24 per year for the average taxpayer. [Each percent represents about $1 million]. Carroll said the MSBA treats the contingency for soft costs and hard costs as separate items.
The base building is 138,000 square feet. MSBA allows an expenditure of $1,200 per student for furniture, fixtures and equipment and an additional $1,200 per student for technology costs. Reducing FFE and technology costs may have saved $810,000. For most of his professional career, the FFE allotment has been sufficient, but even five years ago, the technology limit was difficult, Connor said. COVID’s effect on the cost of materials have meant the recommendation to increase the allowance for both costs by 50 percent to $1,800.
“You would just start to spend some of your soft costs on contingency, if you went with that option,” he said.
Reconsideration of ineligible square footages: The auditorium is expected to be consider an ineligible cost in its entirety, but the MSBA has been asked to reconsider the stage area in the past, which they have done because they accept cafetoriums. Reducing the stage area could trim $684,215 if it had been adopted.
“We feel we can make any or all of those changes and still make the Aug. 31 date,” he said.
Tier 2
Reductions in these plan components could impact educational program and operations.
Eliminating auditorium and wellness area, creating a cafetorium, which is more difficult from the design standpoint represents $5.1 million on the construction value but since the auditorium is an ineligible cost, the town would save quite a bit more than that. 7 to 8 million.
Reducing the size of the gym, represented a saving of $4,303,000, for the gym which is now 3,200 square feet over what the MSBA allows.
Reduce the teacher planning area by 304 square feet would have trimmed costs by about $390,000.
Reduction of outdoor storage, mostly for outdoor maintenance and sports equipment would have meant a price cut of $286,265. Superintendent of Schools Jeff Szymaniak said he is not specifically familiar with the middle school, but the high school, built in 2003, lack of storage is a major complaint.
“It may not seem like a big deal, but in 20 years, it could be a big deal,” he said.
Tier 3
No question, it will impact educational program and operations, it’s a matter of how much it will impact them.
Cutting 25 percent of the students by switching back to the current grade six to eight program would also eliminate 19,000 square feet from the building, but also causes a delay by way of a need to redesign the building.
Target construction changes would have eliminated $1 million and changing the grade configuration back to a five to six program would have trimmed $6.8 million.
“Any of these savings [in Tiers 2 and 3] have not considered any escalation due to delays or anything like that,” Carroll said. But they affect educational programs to continue meeting the time on learning requirements by DESE.
Select Board member Shawn Kain asked what happens if the voters do not pass the school issue – what action would the MSBA take?
Carroll said a re-vote could be allowed or the town could stop the project. Other cuts could also be made from the three tiers.
But missing the Aug. 31 deadline could require filing for an extension in any case.
The MSBA is willing to work with districts, however.
“They’re not looking to kick you out,” he said.
Select Board representative to the committee Justin Evans asked how much a delay could cost.
Architect said major changes such as eliminating the auditorium or a grade level would essentially been going back to the beginning of the design phase and the town would have to go back to the MSBA for guidance.
A delay could cost $350,000 per month for delay of project.
Small said he would be hesitant to save on contingency, which serves as a financial safety net in the event of problems, as well as FFE and the stage. He preferred to keep the contingency protection, hoping that they could get the stage money back and “covering ourselves for the FFE down the line.”