From Patchwork Repairs to a $239 Million School: The Norwalk High School story so far

NORWALK, Conn. — Norwalk raised the contingency allowance on its new high school project this week. At the Aug. 11 City Council meeting, the contingency allowance for Gilbane Building Company, the project’s construction manager, was increased by $3,540,305 so the city could accept the bid for a site concrete package, and a second increase was approved to cover change orders on the same job.

That vote is the latest step in a project that began nearly a decade ago as a plan to patch up an aging building.

The surprise 80% funding deal

For years, Norwalk had been asking the state to reimburse it for repairs at Norwalk High School piece by piece.

In 2017, the city budgeted $6 million for repairs, later increased to $11.5 million to cover painting, restroom renovations, and other fixes.

At the time, a full new school seemed out of reach. The state’s standard reimbursement rate for school construction was only around 32%, then-Norwalk Public Schools Chief Financial Officer Thomas Hamilton later explained to the Board of Education, so the city kept requesting piecemeal repair money instead, project by project.

That changed in May 2019, when State Sen. Bob Duff met with Kosta Diamantis, director of the state’s Office of School Construction Grants and Review, to talk through Norwalk High’s ongoing repair problems.

Diamantis connected the idea to a pilot program: if the school’s P-TECH Academy and a new Visual and Performing Arts Academy each enrolled 100 students from outside Norwalk, the state could reimburse a new building at 80%, instead of the standard rate.

On Dec. 9 of that year, Duff, then-Mayor Harry Rilling, and then-Superintendent Steven Adamowski announced at Norwalk High School that the city would build an entirely new school rather than keep patching the old one.

The announcement caught much of the city off guard, including some Board of Education members, and drew immediate criticism from former board members who called it “pork barrel politics” pushed through without enough public input.

A city planning memo written years later, in 2022, would go on to call the 80% reimbursement rate unprecedented for Norwalk and unlikely to be repeated.

A $225 million plan shrinks to $189 million

In 2021, the city submitted a grant application to the state for $225 million. State legislation approved the project that October, but the total budget was cut to $189 million.

That reduction forced real trade-offs. The existing science wing, originally slated for demolition, would instead be renovated and kept standing. A planned pool was entirely pushed out of the budget, though the city kept it in the building’s design in hopes of finding money for it later.

That decision didn’t sit well with residents. More than 900 people signed an online petition titled “Save the NHS Pool!” that March, pressuring the city and state to find a way to fund it.

Then in May 2022, the state added $50 million to the project, raising the total budget to $239 million.

Build around students, or move them?

Around the same time the state was settling on final numbers, the city and its design team were wrestling with a harder question: where to actually put the new school. Two main options emerged.

Option A would have been built in phases around the existing building at the intersection of Strawberry Hill Avenue and County Street, keeping students on campus throughout construction. That approach was expected to last more than four years, with heavy disruption to students and staff throughout.

Option B would build fresh on Testa Field, avoiding the phased-construction headache but disrupting athletics for roughly five years instead.

In the end, the city chose Option B.

An FBI subpoena casts a shadow

The same official who helped set Norwalk on the path to a new school would later become the subject of an FBI investigation, one that became public in early 2022.

Diamantis was, at the time of his May 2019 conversation with Duff, the director of Connecticut’s Office of School Construction Grants and Review, the office that decided which school projects got state money and how much.

He was removed from a separate state budget post and suspended from the school construction job on Oct. 28, 2021. Rather than accept the suspension, he retired. At that point, the only public issue tied to Diamantis was the state’s chief prosecutor hiring his daughter.

That changed on Feb. 2, 2022, when the state released a copy of a federal grand jury subpoena, in response to a public records request, showing the FBI had been investigating school construction grants overseen by Diamantis, along with a separate state pier project, since at least October 2021.

The subpoena sought records covering all state school construction projects going back to January 2018, a scope broad enough to include Norwalk’s.

Rilling said at the time that he didn’t expect the investigation to affect the Norwalk High School project, noting it had already been reviewed and funded by the state legislature.

More than two years later, in May 2024, federal prosecutors arrested Diamantis and charged him with 22 counts, including extortion, bribery, conspiracy, and lying to federal investigators.

The indictment accused him of using his state position to pressure contractors into paying him a cut of school construction contracts, with the allegations centered on projects in Hartford and Tolland.

None of the federal charges against Diamantis involve Norwalk’s schools. Diamantis’ second corruption trial will begin with jury selection on Dec. 4.

Where things stand now

Construction ramped up through 2023 and 2024. In February 2024, the Council approved a Guaranteed Maximum Price of roughly $219.6 million with Gilbane Building Company as construction manager, plus a separate, smaller guaranteed price for non-state-funded work.

Those approvals came with contingency funds set aside for the change orders that inevitably show up on a project this size, the same kind of contingency request that passed on Aug. 11.

Monthly project updates through the summer of 2026 describe steady physical progress: roofing substantially complete, exterior walls up, windows and curtainwall going in section by section.

Nearly a decade after the first repair bid went out, a new high school is taking shape on Testa Field. There’s still work left to do, but the city is now about a year away from opening the doors, with the building on track for the fall 2027 semester.