Renovation of the historic Emery Grover school administration building is nearly complete, and school department staffers are expected to begin returning to their former workplace early next month.
“There’s still a punch list, but we hope to have a temporary certificate of occupancy by the end of this month,” Hank Haff, the town’s director of building design and construction, said of the few remaining items on the $23.7 million project’s to-do list.
The October return is slightly behind the project’s original schedule, a delay caused mainly by a structural issue discovered last fall related to the original 19th century masonry work on its brick walls.
“We did find, during the construction, that it was necessary to either rebuild, reinforce, repoint or enhance the structural capacity of those brick walls,” Haff told the School Committee at its Sept. 17 meeting. “That took an additional two months and delayed the overall project schedule.”
The oldest of the town’s public buildings, the 126-year-old Emery Grover is now also one of the greenest after being converted to an all-electric building using air-source heat pumps and no fossil fuels.
“We will be looking at ground-source and air-source heat pumps for all new major construction projects. It’s a very efficient way to both heat and cool a building,” said Haff, who said Emery Grover is expected to have a very low Energy Use Intensity (EUI) rating of less than 30.
EUI is a standard the town’s new opt-in specialized energy code uses to measure energy consumption, which tends to be higher in older buildings. “The oldest of the school buildings, like Mitchell for example, might have double or triple that in terms of their EUI,” said Haff.
Despite the delays, Haff said the project will come in on budget. It will not only be a far more energy efficient building, but also a modernized office space that is fully accessible. It now has an elevator, and a full sprinkler system, and access has been restored to the previously condemned third floor.
Deficiencies at the Highland Avenue building, which opened in 1898 as Needham’s first high school building, were noted as far back as the 1990 Town Master Plan, but no significant upgrades were ever funded.
Potential plans discussed over the decades called for converting it for use as the town’s senior center or selling the building so it could be used for housing or other private use.
Opponents of restoring the building argued school administration staff could be dispersed across various school buildings and/or other town-owned office space, or that the town could lease private office space. The alternative of having staff work from home was also suggested during the COVID-19 era.
Fall Town Meeting in 2021 breathed life into the restoration project when it approved $1.475 million in design funds. The renovation was then funded as a $19.4 million project at the May 2022 Town Meeting. An additional appropriation was approved at Fall Town Meeting in October 2022 to account for escalating construction costs.
Some $6 million of the budget came from Community Preservation Act funds, for which Emery Grover qualified as a National Historic Register landmark. The remainder came from a combination of debt and free cash.
“I just want to take us back a little bit to when we started this project,” said School Committee member Michael Greis at the Sept. 17 meeting.
“We had a lot of argument and a lot of discussion in the community. People wanted to just tear the building down, and probably would have put up something that looked awful, quite frankly.
“And now we have this incredibly beautiful building. It looks terrific. It fits beautifully now into the downtown.”
School administrative staff have been working at the former Hillside School since shortly before construction began on Jan. 2, 2023. All staff, with the exception of the IT department, will return to Highland Avenue. Haff said the IT staff will remain at Hillside for the foreseeable future.
“Hillside will continue to be used for a while,” said Superintendent Dan Gutekanst. “It’s not going anywhere.”
While a specific date has not been set, Gutekanst said there are plans for a rededication ceremony sometime this fall, “before the weather gets really bad.”
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