A run for the money
Districts competing for state funds for school building projects will be facing a taller hurdle: As state officials try to control the reins on spending, they vow to apply greater scrutiny of local plans and decisions.
The Carlisle School has been in its current location in some form or another for at least 150 years, so it's no surprise that school officials have concerns about the condition of some of the facilities on the campus.
But it's not the campus's oldest building that worries the administrators.
"The 150-year old building is one of the best buildings we have," said Christy Barbee, chairwoman of the school's building committee.
It's the 50-year-old Spalding building, one of six small buildings that make up the elementary school campus, that is causing the greatest headaches. That building leaks every time it rains; there's mold growing on the walls outside and the wood trim is rotted. And then there are the termites.
The Carlisle school district is one of dozens in communities northwest of Boston that recently submitted requests for millions of dollars in state money to build or repair their schools. The so-called statements of interest went to the Massachusetts School Building Authority under a new system that is meant to be tougher on school systems. Statewide, hundreds of schools will be competing for up to $500 million in school construction cash in the coming school year. The deadline for schools to submit their statements of interest was Tuesday.
State Treasurer Timothy Cahill, who oversees the School Building Authority, said there is no way the state will be able to fund all the projects that have been proposed, meaning school districts will have to make the strongest case possible to win state assistance. State officials will be analyzing districts' facilities needs through the end of the year, when the authority expects to pick the schools that will receive funding next school year.
The state will pick up between 40 and 80 percent of the total cost,
A list of districts with schools needing repairs is on Page 5
and the towns and districts will pick up the rest. The state could reimburse cities and towns for minor projects, such as new boilers, as early as next March. But other payments will follow the pace of construction, which could take years, authority officials said.
In Carlisle, Barbee said the town has looked at dozens of options for repairing and modernizing its campus, which is an unusual collection of five mostly one-story buildings ranging from 10 to 150 years old spread over 23 wooded acres. Planners have all but ruled out building on a new site.
"Over the last couple of years we have looked at how we can maximize this campus," Barbee said. "One of the ways we can do that is to not cling to this campus idea."
The layout requires youngsters to traverse sometimes snowy, uncovered walkways to get from class to the nurse's office, cafeteria, or library.
So, one popular option calls for razing the Spalding building and building an addition on one of the existing buildings. One estimate of the cost to fix up the campus is $65 million, though town officials balked at the high cost, Barbee said.
In Concord, directly to the south of Carlisle, school officials also have their eye on the new pot of state money. The overcrowding in Concord is such that officials have taken to teaching students in the hallways of Willard Elementary School.
After several years of growth, the Willard school's enrollment has plateaued at about 375, and the 52,000-square-foot building has not been adequate for a while, said Patricia Fernandes, who has been principal for seven years.
"We've had to carve out spaces to accommodate the needs a contemporary school has," Fernandes said.
Unlike the Carlisle school, which has computers on carts wheeled around the school campus, Willard Elementary does have a dedicated computer lab. But just try getting to it.
"Our computer lab is in a very inaccessible part of the building," Fernandes said. "You have to go through the library, through an anteroom, through a corridor, and then through a storage room to get to the computer room. The emergency egress route out of there is to an enclosed courtyard."
From time to time, testing and tutoring take place in hallways, said Brenda Finn, superintendent of Concord and Concord-Carlisle public schools. Music teachers also sometimes find themselves providing lessons in the corridors.
Things aren't much better at Concord-Carlisle Regional High School, where there is no room for the entire band to practice together.
And the increased need for the use of technology in classrooms has made the high school, like many other school facilities built in the 1950s, inadequate for the task, Finn said.
"The classroom of 50 years ago does not look like the classroom of 2007 and the classroom of the future," she said. "Some of the expectations that we now have for learning and for teaching weren't even on the horizon 50 years ago."
For instance, the science labs don't meet the needs of a science class in which all students are expected to be engaged in experiments simultaneously.
"My main concern is that we have a building that provides for a full range of programs and provides both breadth and depth for all the students who attend Concord-Carlisle High School," Finn said.
Several communities northwest of Boston are seeking state funding for multiple school projects, and some, like Winchester, submitted statements of interest for all the schools in the district.
To help pare down their deliberations, the Massachusetts School Building Authority has created another step in the process, asking districts to prioritize the neediest schools.
"One way to cull the list down was asking communities to prioritize, as opposed to us prioritizing right off the bat," Cahill said. "We have all agreed that with a limited amount of money, doing more than one project per district is probably not realistic in the first year, nor might it be fair."
The districts have until the middle of August to submit their priorities.
That makes for tough choices. Winchester Superintendent James Marini said officials have not determined yet how they will choose the highest-priority school out of its list of eight.
"All of those schools have considerable needs," Marini said. "And the town is experiencing expanding enrollment growth."
Each of its elementary schools and the high school are expected to be over capacity by 2012, he said.
Winchester isn't the only community to have submitted a tall stack applications.
Dracut submitted statements of interest for the high school and all four elementary schools, and Woburn sent in six elementary schools.
Other districts submitted just one school, hoping it would increase their chances.
"We definitely had in mind that we wanted to make sure we made the strongest statement," said Anthony J. Bent, superintendent in Shrewsbury, which submitted an application only for its middle school.
He said the public should be pleased with the new process, even if it means fewer requests are funded.
"They had to rein it in, because it was far beyond the reasonable capacity of the state to fund," Bent said. "Now it's more contained. There perhaps won't be the unrestrained approvals, but it's fiscally responsible what they're doing."
Katherine Craven, executive director of the School Building Authority, said districts that do not receive funding the first year of the program could be funded in later years. The authority plans to spend $2.5 billion on school construction over the next five years.
"Our job is to try and work through every community's issues and find out which communities are the neediest," Craven said. "The state's money should go to them first. Hopefully we'll get to everyone in some fashion."
John C. Drake can be reached at jdrake@globe.com. 