New Haven Independent

Cheryl L. Miller is vice president of the Madison-based firm. It does statistical analyzing, budgeting, and forecasting so that the Board of Education will be able to budget for and plan preventive maintenance, particularly on big ticket systems such as boilers in its dozens of new and renovated schools built since the school construction program began in the mid 1990s.

“We help build a culture of stewardship,” is the way Miller put it when she came before the BOE’s Administration and Finance Committee Monday night. At issue was hiring her firm, for $50,000, to produce a plan enabling the BOE to get beyond short-term maintenance to set aside resources for preventative care and repair of its new, and increasingly complex, school facilities.

For the pilot, the BOE will be choosing five schools in various, representative stages of their life cycle from within the school construction program, which began in earnest in about 1998.

The issue, according to schools construction coordinator Sue Weisselberg, is that no district in the state has built on the scale New Haven has. Yet there is nothing in the school construction program, which is primarily funded by the state, to plan for or to pay for disruptions in major equipment and systems.

The project is more than a streamlined form of preventative maintenance, according to the BOE’s chief operating officer, Will Clark. “If a boiler breaks down,” he said, “it shouldn’t break down because it’s 25 years old, and we have not replaced it. There should be pro-active planning and resources for replacement. That’s what the contract with Sightlines will seek to establish.

“Our hope, ” he said, “is to lead the charge with the state, to show them the logic of incorporating this kind of thinking - and funding - in school construction.”

Andrew Butler, executive director of Aramark, which supervises facilities maintenance for the BOE, was a hearty supporter. “In the private sector this is done all the time he said. When Yale builds a building, they raise a separate endowment for repair and maintenance.”

That apparently is unheard of in public school construction. “You pour all this capital into your city’s school system,” Miller said, “and you can’t just walk away from it.”

Sightlines, she said, has done this kind of long term planning, for more than 200 projects, largely for colleges. The NHPS will be the first public school system for them, a toe in the water, to use Clark’s phrase, both for the company and the BOE.

Miller promised to produce a tool, on the basis of which BOE officials can provide data and begin to make the case with the state on the important of protecting the capital investment in schools.

Clark said that no new funds are required for the contract. “We had fewer than anticipated legal expenses,” he said. “The funds for this simply came out of that budget line and are being transferred here.”

Miller said her company would produce its first planning product for the BOE within three months.