HANOVER — Superintendent-director Dr. Thomas J. Hickey told the South Shore Tech School Committee, at it’s July 21 meeting, that the window replacement project is expected to begin during the third week of August.
Hickey said the school also plans to open on Aug. 31 with a full regular season of sports.
“It will go into the school year, but it will not have an impact as the company will transition to work in the second shift,” Hickey said of the window project’s potential effect on school routine, noting the district is having regular meetings with the design team and the project manager.
As for the potential for continued mask and social distancing regulations, Hickey said in a recent interview that he is waiting for guidance from the state, but he has met with administrators “kind of bracing ourselves for that in view of information from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on the more contagious nature of the COVID Delta variant.
“The mask part would be easy to implement,” he said. “The spacing part may require us to have to take a half a step back.”
He also expressed concern about the potential transportation impact if there was guidance from the state and some adjustments might be needed for classrooms in such a case.
So far, no new regulations have been received, but the school has already begun to examine increasing classroom capacity.
“At this point, for a lot of districts, it’s going to be kind of wait and see,” Hickey said. “If it [effects] space, I hope a decision is made sooner, rather than later.”
SST is also continuing to work around the building as they “return classrooms to some version of normal” and is making some renovations to the school’s lecture hall.
“You’re all familiar with our space crunch, so we’re going to be making multi-purpose use of our lecture hall to allow for library media specialists to be able to use that and have us use it more often.”
Hickey said the lecture hall is the last part of the school that may be going under-used. While maintaining the current seating, a mezzanine is being added to allow more versatility in use.
The committee voted to encumber a transfer of $1,487,382 in nonresident tuition to be applied to the fiscal 2022 budget and reduce the assessments to the district towns.
The winter budget presentation will outline the anticipated offset numbers.
“This information was predictable,” Hickey said of the presentation that had projected fiscal 2022 town assessments.
“We assume/project we will have this tuition money when we assess the towns in the following year,” Hickey said this week.
The committee also voted to credit $59,293 in surplus revenue for warrants payable from the 2019-20 budget. They also voted to debit $24,238 from surplus revenue to accrued salaries in the 2019-20 budget.
The Committee voted to encumber $398,000 in surplus revenue for building, grounds, equipment and supplies or any other recommendations by the superintendent-director. Another encumberance of $740,000 from surplus revenue for design, renovation and construction costs identified in the 2018 facilities master plan.
A sixth transfer of $134,151 from surplus regional transportation was approved to the regional transportation fund. Another $103,849 was voted from surplus revenue to bus costs and $80,000 was transferred from surplus revenues to the school lunch enterprise fund to cover COVID-19-related revenue decreases.
The committee conducted its year-end reorganization, again electing Robert Heywood as chairman and Robert Molla as vice chairman.
The Committee entered into executive session to discuss strategy with respect to collective bargaining or litigation. The committee adjourned from executive session.