PT board proceeds with assessment of facilities
McMURRAY – Peters Township School Board voted Monday to proceed with a facilities assessment of district schools and buildings by Hayes Design Group.
The Collier Township architectural firm also was contracted in April to conduct a feasibility design study for a potential new high school, in anticipation of the district acquiring more than half the site of the former Rolling Hills Country Club on East McMurray Road.
The facilities assessment will address Pleasant Valley and Bower Hill elementary schools, Peters Township Middle School, the district garage and maintenance building, administration office building and certain facets of the high school stadium. At McMurray Elementary School, which recently underwent renovation and where a new parking lot is planned for 2017, the assessment includes only the roof and access road.
The goal is to determine improvements that the district will have to address at each building and for the architectural firm to prepare corresponding cost estimates. If the district moves forward with plans for a new high school, “a budget will be developed for the minimum amount of work that could/needs to be done at the existing high school to enable the existing building systems to function and meet code for 20 years,” according to the professional services agreement.
The fee for the assessment’s basic scope of services is $29,500. At a Nov. 14 school board committee meeting, board member Lisa Anderson asked about the advisability of seeking other bids.
Fellow director Ronald Dunleavy said the district has established a relationship with Hayes regarding those types of services.
“I do believe that this feasibility study is very important because, for me, I need to know how the rest of these buildings shape up before I’ll even think about making a decision about building a new school. I think this is something we should move forward on,” he said about the facilities assessment, “and I think it’s a fair price.”
William Merrell, building and grounds committee chairman, agreed.
“As we said in September, we could not make our determination until we, in fact, got all the information on how much it was going to cost to upgrade all the facilities in the district, or how much it was going to cost to upgrade certain facilities,” he said. “And then have a discussion about the cost and where we go from here.”