New School Project Under Budget So Far

     The Bourne Elementary School and Early Learning Center is well under budget, which could mean relief for town taxpayers.
     According to a project cost review provided by the school department, the total cost of the new building, including design, improvements and various studies, will be in the area of $24.5 million, which is $2.3 million less than they were authorized to spend by Town Meeting voters.
     That money will not be put toward making major improvements to the school, rather, Superintendent Edmond W. LaFleur and school building committee Chairman Mary Jo Coggeshall said, they will cut off their spending to ease the tax burden on the townspeople.
     As the town is being reimbursed at a rate of 61 percent, the total amount of tax savings to the town would be in the area of $1 million.
     “We made a commitment that we would not spend where we didn’t need to spend,” Mr. LaFleur said.
     Ms. Coggeshall and Mr. LaFleur said they are both pleased with how construction has progressed so far.
     “I’m ecstatic that we’re going to have a new school building in Bourne,” Ms. Coggeshall said.
     However, they both admitted that the structure came up short in a few ways.
     First, it’s too small.
     “We are building a school that will be full to capacity on its first day,” Mr. LaFleur said. “There will be no extra space to work with in the building.”
     Both Ms. Coggeshall and Mr. LaFleur said they fully expect that the school will need to be expanded in the near future.
     Also, when the school committee pared back the school’s design after Town Meeting voters rejected $13.2 million in cost escalations in November of 2006, room for all-day kindergarten was scratched from the design.
     Though the committee has spent approximately $2.5 million on various improvements to the school, such as upgrades to the roof, a new canopy and improved curbing, they have yet to put any money toward increasing the size of the building.
     In December, the school committee shot down increasing the square footage of the gym, which will accommodate about half a basketball court.
     When the construction bid came in at $14.5 million, much lower than the school building committee expected, there was no will to go back out to bid with a design that included room for all-day kindergarten.
     Mr. LaFleur said he would have been “tenacious” in advocating for a space for all-day kindergarten in the new building if he thought the town could afford it.
     However, he said with the fluctuating cost of building supplies, it was more prudent for the district to move forward with the scaled-down design rather than to go back out to bid in the hope of building an affordable school that included room for all-day kindergarten classes.
     “We needed to move forward or we wouldn’t be building a school right now,” he said.
     Ms. Coggeshall agreed, saying the certainty of an affordable new school building could not be passed up.
      “It would have been too much of a gamble [to go back out to bid],” Ms. Coggeshall said.
     In hindsight, Mr. LaFleur said, poor timing was responsible for the loss of all-day kindergarten at the school.
     In 2006, while the school committee waited to learn whether the Massachusetts Highway Department would be able to provide safe access to the proposed school, the price of building materials sky-rocketed, pushing the price of the school $13 million over the $26.8 million approved by Town Meeting voters in 2003.
     When asked if the delay between 2003 and 2006 caused by Mass Highway doomed all-day kindergarten in Bourne, Mr. LaFleur paused momentarily before responding.
     “In my opinion, those delays doomed a lot of things,” he said.