Building Committee Tries To Upgrade School’s Pared Down Design

     As the Bourne Elementary School passes the halfway point in construction, the school building committee wants to take some time to make sure the scaled-down school is not missing any critical components.
     During its regularly scheduled meeting last week, the committee asked architects from Kaestle Boos Inc. to come back with a list of items that were cut from the project’s design after voters refused to fund $13.2 million in cost escalations in fall of 2006.
     In October of 2007, the school building committee was given the go-ahead by Town Meeting voters to use a $26.8 million bond from the Massachusetts School Building Authority to construct the new school. 
     The $14.5 million bid they accepted from Braitt Builders Co. came in $12.3 million under their projected budget.
     With the building project safely under budget, the school building committee late last year approved more than a dozen upgrades at a cost of approximately $2 million, including a revamped roof, an entry canopy, granite curbing, and a guardrail on the school’s entry road.
     Now, Richard A. Lavoie, vice chairman of the school building committee, said, the school building committee wants to make sure that any important items that were cut from the project’s design are not overlooked.
     “What we’ve asked the architect to do is to go back and look at the list of items we had eliminated from the budget when the first bid came in so high,” he said. “We want to make sure we haven’t missed something that is going to be critical to the functioning of the building. Leading up to the bid last fall, I can’t tell you how many hours we put in really stripping things out of the original scope of work just to make sure it came in under amount.”
     He added, “That’s sort of what we want to recapture.”
     Among the potential additions, Mr. Lavoie said, would be a new curtain for the school’s multipurpose room, a bathroom for the administrative area, and additional parking.
     “We think we’re in pretty good shape, but we just don’t want to take a chance,” he said. “The whole process has been six or eight years long and we don’t want to overlook something we might have missed, like the playground.”
     Last week, the school building committee also discovered that the plans for the school did not include a playground.
     “Somebody asked, ‘Where’s the playground,’ and we said, ‘Gee, we don’t have one,’ ” Mr. Lavoie said.
     Committee member Christine C. Crane said she was “speechless” after architect Ashley C. Prester told the committee that there was currently no playground planned for the school.
     Mr. Lavoie said it is those kinds of easily overlooked details that the school building committee wants to make sure are given a second chance of being added to the school’s plan.
     The committee also talked about some ways they could add some character to the new building, such as memorializing the Ella F. Hoxie Elementary School and Otis Memorial School, both of which will close down at the end of the 2008/2009 school year.
     The committee talked about the idea of either creating a time capsule at the new school filled with items from Hoxie and Otis, or even transplanting some plants from the old schools to the site of the new building.
     Committee Chairman Mary Jo Coggeshall also proposed creating a friendship garden on a small plot of turf near the school’s parking lot.
     Ms. Coggeshall said the friendship garden would help the school save money, because rather than having the area mowed by the school’s groundskeeper, the garden could be kept up by community gardening groups who wanted to plant flowers there.
     “It would really enhance the community aspect of the school,” Mr. Lavoie said.
     “We just want to make sure the school is a good environment in which to teach and more importantly a good place to learn,” he said. “It’s a lot easier to make those kinds of additions during the construction rather than having to go back later and to try to make replacements.”