The town is attempting to take a key step toward securing tens of millions of dollars of state support for what could be a $300 million project to renovate the Pollard Middle School by asking the Massachusetts School Building Authority to act favorably on the town’s plans.
The town’s plan is to build out Pollard so it can once again be a Grade 6-8 middle school. This would allow the current sixth grade center at High Rock School to be converted to the town’s sixth elementary school. Pollard would stay open during construction.
Later this month, the Massachusetts School Building Authority will vote on Needham’s request to move into the feasibility study phase of the MSBA’s lengthy funding process. This would require the MSBA to confirm that Needham is ready to manage and fund the project and should be allowed to enter the capital pipeline.
Needham was one of 19 communities voted into the MSBA’s eligibility period last December, the start of a journey that could take as much as four years before any construction begins. The December selection led to a successful request at Town Meeting for $2.75 million to fund the elaborate study, which is expected to take 18 months to complete.
Needham had nine months to complete its initial application but finished the process in a little more than one-third of the allotted time. “We’re well ahead of their deadline,” said Hank Haff, the town’s director of housing and construction and de facto project manager on the effort.
“We have submitted all the documents that they require, including the educational program, the enrollment process, the maintenance and capital planning documents. The school building committee has been formed,” he said, checking the boxes of the tasks that needed to be done.
The Permanent Public Building Committee signed off on the application at its Oct. 7 meeting, and Town Manager Kate Fitzpatrick added her signature the following day.
“Having a Permanent Public Building Committee does speed up the process,” Haff said of the town board that was established in 1996 to oversee all town construction projects estimated to cost $500,000 or more. The PPBC’s creation was motivated by a problematic past project at Pollard.
The MSBA process has eight “modules” and a positive vote will move Needham into the second module of the process, which includes selecting an architect and designer.
“My goal is to try to get the designer selected by January,” Haff told the PPBC at its meeting. “Now that’s pushing it because we have to go through the MSBA approval process, and we have to go through the required advertising for designer. But we’re attempting to get through those two phases as rapidly as possible.”
George Kent, who has been on the PPBC since its creation, articulated this need for speed in getting the feasibility study underway.
“If we can find a way to improve the schedule of the project, we can improve the cost, which is critically important, especially on this project,” he said, noting it will be the most expensive construction project in town history.
“We did it before at Sunita Williams . . . there’s a possibility to do that here,” he added of the last major school project done with MSBA funds, an effort that was completed ahead of schedule and under budget.
The project is not likely to go forward without the MSBA funds. Haff said the MSBA’s current base reimbursement rate is 35.42% of project costs, but a variety of mitigating factors will very likely drive that down to somewhere between 20% and 25%, as happened on the Sunita Williams project.
The town’s plan to rebuild at Pollard while keeping the school open needs to be validated by the MSBA.
“The MSBA will require us to do a whole slew of different alternative studies — looking at total demolition and replacement; looking at renovation; looking at seventh and eighth grade only and keeping the sixth grade elsewhere; looking at combining the two,” said Haff.
“Unless somebody has come up with a greenfield site elsewhere in town where we can build a whole new building and move into it, we will be looking toward the existing Pollard site to build the new Pollard building,” he said.
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