NORWALK, Conn. – A realistic yet optimistic tone marked a discussion about the proposed Norwalk Early Childhood Center on Monday, in contrast to the pessimism expressed a month ago.
A scaled down version of the Allen Road facility, which would cost $2.5 million instead of $4 million, would be submitted for state approval by June 30 if the Board of Education approves it, Building and Facilities Manager Alan Lo told two members of the BoE School Facilities and Planning Committee.
The makeover of the old Roosevelt School into a centralized location for pre-K schooling was an initiative of former Superintendent of Schools Manny Rivera, who pushed to enact the recommendation in the 2012 Capitol Region Education Council (CREC) report. Rivera hoped to get it open this fall, but in January announced that just wasn’t possible.
A month ago Board of Education Vice Chairman Artie Kassimis expressed doubt that the center would ever be built. “How do I put this? Right now the price is at $2 million, but every step we take it seems the price keeps going up. It could double and hit $4 million, and it could go even higher,” Kassimis said on April 8.
The plan has been downscaled from eight classrooms to six, Norwalk Public Schools Chief Financial Officer Rich Rudl said Monday to Kassimis and BoE member Bryan Meek. If there were eight, you would have to do a traffic study and fix up the parking lot, and the state would not give its 32.8 percent reimbursement for the parking lot work, Rudl said.
“They were going to apply a formula based on the square footage used so (reimbursement) would probably be cut in half,” Rudl said. “(Eight classrooms) triggered a whole number of expenses that elevated the cost of the project up so in order to try and see if we could push forward with this project we decided to take a step back and look at six classrooms.”
A revised cost estimate delivered last week was just under $2.5 million, of which $2.3 million would be eligible for state reimbursement, Rudl said. That would mean $750,000 from the state, with Norwalk’s tab coming to $1.715 million, Rudl said.
The project is funded with $771,000 of BoE surplus money from 2013-14 and an $880,000 special capital appropriation approved by the Common Council in January. So the Board is $64,000 short, he said.
But, in consultation with Norwalk’s Finance Department, it develops that there is $330,000 in an account that can be used for this project, Rudl said.
“As this project moves forward we have a little bit of contingency, so we can tap into that account,” Building and Facilities Manager Alan Lo said.
Staff restrooms will not be renovated, except for accessibility, the front entryway will be scaled down and the gym will not be remodeled, Rudl said. The six classrooms would be full with 18 students in each one, meaning there would be no room for growth, he said.
“If the program were to grow you might have to select one school to have a classroom in it,” Rudl said.
The Board needs to approve the new changes, he said. Construction could then begin in November if the state approves it. It would be done in four or five months.
The biggest benefit to the project would be opening up space in the schools, Rudl said, but Meek said the CREC report actually recommended a central location to keep the teachers from driving all over town. The nearby Cranbury Elementary School could contribute two classrooms, which are already being used for pre-K, and keep the spirit of the arrangement, he said.
“You’re trying to avoid specialists from crisscrossing the city, Brookside to Marvin, paying them half the day to sit in the car in Norwalk traffic, is that right?” Meek said.
“Programmatically, I think from the CREC report, it was more about more about bringing all of the experts, the preschool experts, together in one building so that they can collaborate and have consultation and provide consistency across the district rather than having these pre-Ks in six different schools,” Special Education Director Christine Fensore said.
Reconfiguring the parking lot could be done in another phase of construction, Rudl said.
“One of the difficulties is there’s not a lot of open space within Norwalk to build a brand new school,” Rudl said. “There’s also not that many left, decommissioned schools.”
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