There haven’t been many big Lexington High School building project updates since the debt exclusion vote passed in December — but the project is moving along.
The School Building Committee (SBC) has worked with architects to further revise sketches, presented a majority gender-neutral bathroom design, found savings in some places, and worked through roadblocks in others.
Here’s what the LHS building project team (meaning the SBC and the companies Lexington contracted to design and build the school) has been up to this year, what’s happening now, and what’s to come in the near future.
What’s happened this year
The project team submitted its “Design Development” package to the Massachusetts School Building Authority, which is the state body the town is working with to fund the project, on April 14. The Design Development phase is when an early, conceptual design is fleshed out into definitive technical specifications, dimensions, and material choices.
The team started doing some “Targeted Value Design” during that phase, which is when they look for possible cost savings without deviating from the agreed upon design or educational plan. They found about $2.3 million in savings through Targeted Value Design.
At the same time, they faced a roadblock regarding how the ground source heat pumps that would heat and cool the new building would be serviced. With the Permanent Building Committee’s support, the team decided to invest in lowering the floor level of the mechanical room to allow service professionals to access the underground heat pumps, Mike Cronin, Lexington’s director of public facilities, explained.
The idea there was not that because the team found a few million dollars in savings that it would then spend that money elsewhere, Joe Pato, a Select Board liaison to the School Building Committee, told the Observer. But it did work out that the town essentially netted even cost-wise after those instances.
The team then jumped into the “Construction Design” phase, which is the last design phase when they finalize technical specifications, architectural and engineering plans, and contract terms. Essentially, it’s when sketches are taken up a notch from Design Development so they can be built off of.
What’s happening now
A few things are on the docket for the next few weeks.
The project team is working with the town’s Conservation Commission to get a permit called an Order of Conditions. An Order of Conditions outlines the rules, restrictions, and environmental protections an applicant must follow when performing specific construction or alteration work on a property. In this instance, some of that specific alteration work that falls under the Conservation Commission’s scope is building on and replicating wetlands, Conservation Commission Chair Ruth Ladd explained to the Observer.
Members of the LHS building project team are poised to meet with the Commission again on June 9 with the hope of wrapping up discussion on the project. During the Commission’s last meeting on May 19, the Commission and its outside consultant from Apex Companies decided they needed more clarification from the building project team on storm water calculations and the peer review of the team’s wetlands plan before voting to close the hearing.
That isn’t the only adversity the project team faced at the last Conservation Commission meeting. Resident Jim Williams spoke up a couple times to share his disapproval of the project team’s wetland replication plan, arguing it “won’t even come close to working.”
He disapproves, in part, because he’s skeptical about digging into and connecting the wetlands along Park Drive and Muzzey Street.
“You find a beautiful oasis out in the desert and it’s fed by an aquifer and you decide to make it ten times bigger, so you dig down all around it and now you have ten times the area, and you have the same aquifer delivering the same amount of water and you come back next year and there’s no oasis at all,” Williams analogized.
There was otherwise no resident pushback on the LHS building project at the Conservation Commission meeting on May 19.
If the Commission is ready to vote to close the hearing during its June 9 meeting, and that vote passes, the Commission will then have 21 days to issue the project team an Order of Conditions.
The building project team is also conducting outreach to hear peoples’ opinions on bathroom design, which has garnered a bit of controversy among residents and online nationally this year.
Since the design was first presented, the LHS Building Project team decided to reconfigure the bathrooms. There were originally going to be two sets of gendered bathrooms and one all-gender bathroom on the first floor and then one set of gendered bathrooms and two all-gender bathrooms on the second, third, and fourth floors. Now, the first and third floors will have two sets of gendered bathrooms and one all-gender bathroom and the second and fourth floors will have one set of gendered bathrooms and two all-gender bathrooms.
A mix of LHS Building Project team members (not a quorum) including Pato; Julie Hackett, the Lexington Public Schools superintendent; Kathleen Lenihan, Chair of the School Building Committee; and others will host 35 15-minute virtual office hours on May 27 to gather input and answer questions regarding the LHS bathroom design from residents.
“We know it’s a sensitive topic and not everyone feels comfortable getting up to the microphone and speaking in front of everyone,” Lenihan explained to the Observer. “This gives LPS families and Lexington residents the ability to share concerns they have with the bathroom design and ask any questions they have in a small group or individual setting.”
All of the slots are filled up, but if a resident knows someone who has a timeslot, they can join in to attend.
Because the project is now in the Construction Documents phase, the team will not be able to make major changes, like relocating all the restrooms altogether, based on the feedback they get from residents. But small changes, like increasing passive supervision into bathrooms, or adding more urinals, for example, may be possible.
“I’m hopeful we can use some of the information we gather to give that feedback to the design team and see if there are any modifications we can make that will fit with our overall goal of allowing all students to have access to bathroom facilities that respect their need for privacy and security.”
What’s coming soon
If the Conservation Commission signs off on the Order of Conditions, the project team will break ground and start construction in July.
That doesn’t mean concrete will be poured after we all return from our Fourth of July holidays. It means construction equipment will start to be brought over to the site for site work to begin, which is essentially prepping the area for construction. According to the building project team’s April monthly report, concrete will start to be poured in January.
The team is also finishing up building the finance dashboard which will be displayed on the LHS building project website.
Lenihan is excited to “finally” see shovels hit the ground after years of planning for the new high school.
“It’s been a long time coming and sometimes people say, ‘but the kids, will it help them do better in school?’ Well, our students succeed at an incredibly high rate already — this isn’t about that. Right now, we’re asking them to climb Mount Everest and flip-flops,” Lenihan said, quoting Rick Reilly, a Sports Illustrated writer, who frequently uses the phrase. “Let’s not do that, let’s give them the tools so that they can achieve without struggling against the infrastructure limitations of what people thought high school was in 1953.”
The article states: “If the Conservation Commission signs off on the Order of Conditions, the project team will break ground and start construction in July.”
But the ConCom is *not* the only hurdle left to clear. MEPA has yet to certify the project, and the state Senate has yet to act on Article 97.
Both of these should have been mentioned.