Markeshia Ricks File Photo
Santana: “Somebody didn’t do the work. Somebody bankrolled the money somewhere.”
After embarrassing revelations about deferred maintenance, New Haven plans to launch an annual check on its schools to make sure multi-million-dollar buildings are being kept up.
New Haven Public Schools administrators revealed this plan after a night of tough questions at a hearing Wednesday night.
The questioning took place during a Zoomed meeting of the Board of Alders Education Committee.
The meeting followed on the release of a report by the engineering firm Fuss & O’Neill that showed widespread maintenance problems in school air systems. The New Haven Board of Education asked for the inspections as part of school Covid-19 safety precautions; the final report came out on Monday.
“I cannot remember a time when we’ve had such a comprehensive analysis done in the schools of our ventilation systems,” said Assistant Superintendent Keisha Redd-Hannans. “As we’ve been discussing, this is something we should do regularly, to make sure maintenance is up to par.”
While the district has managed to check through and fix nearly all of the urgent issues Fuss & O’Neill identified, two schools — West Rock STREAM Academy and Quinnipiac Real World Math STEM School — are too far gone to fix, according to health officials and school administrators. So the city is closing those two schools permanently.
The alders asked how those two schools got to such a state of disrepair and why poor maintenance seems to be an issue across the board.
Zoom
The Board of Alders Education Committee.
Fair Haven Heights Alder Rosa Santana spoke about money the city set aside in 2017 to address family and staff concerns with the Quinnipiac school building. One of these concerns was that the school had no heating and the only warm place in the school was the cafeteria. At the time, she was assured that the money was spent and the issues were addressed.
“How can the school be condemned within three years? Somebody didn’t do the work. Somebody bankrolled the money somewhere. This falls back on the Board of Education and its contractors,” Santana said.
Alder Carmen Rodriguez asked about Go To Services, LLC, the contractor that oversees routine maintenance and school cleaning.
“If we have someone who has a contract to take care of and repair our schools, then why — not only because of Covid — are other things still lingering?” Rodriguez said. “This is a lesson learned with everything that we [have to] fix it before we spend money that could’ve been avoided.”
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Christopher Peak Pre-Pandemic File Photo
Kelly Inga with her students at Quinnipiac STEM School, which the city has condemned
Why haven’t schools been maintained? The city spent $1.6 billion ($1.3 billion of it originally from the state) rebuilding all its schools in the 1990s and early 2000s.
The maintenance budget is too small, according to district Chief Financial Officer Phillip J. Penn and Executive Director of Facilities Joseph Barbarotta (who works directly for Go To).
Penn estimated that the district had about $2.5 billion in buildings and other infrastructure. Each of those roofs, windows and boilers has a lifetime between 20 and 50 years, with 30 years being the normal maximum lifespan.
To replace these items at the end of their lives requires a minimum of $7.5 million to $10 million a year, he said. However, the annual maintenance budget is $6.8 million, including technology, HVAC systems and parking lot repairs.
“The capital budget never kept up with the level of building that was done. As an outsider [hired in 2019], that was obvious reading through the financial statements,” Penn said.
The budget for day-to-day maintenance has flatlined over the past several years as well, according to Barbarotta. Still, the district sees 10,000 work orders a year and gets through 90 percent of them.
Emily Hays Photo
Building Manager Chuck Tomaso examines Bishop Woods School’s new air filter.
The district had answers to some of the Quinnipiac-focused questions too.
Despite focusing on daily operations, Barbarotta remembered the 2017 investments Santana mentioned. However, he only saw funds to repaint the school and build a new playground — none to build an HVAC system in the school.
He said that the school was maintained well enough to be safe pre-Covid-19. With the needs of the new world, though, the school would need a ventilation system. That renovation would trigger a whole suite of code updates that Quinnipiac was grandfathered into. It had smoke detectors and emergency lighting but no sprinkler system, for example. The bathroom was not up to the Americans with Disabilities Act standards. Barbarotta estimated that the whole renovation would cost around $5 million.
Alder Darryl J. Brackeen, Jr. pointed to New Haven’s school construction boom as part of the problem.
“We have to pay. We built those schools. Some of us voted for those schools — I voted no on some, because I felt we needed to reinvest in our existing schools. There needs to be shared responsibility,” Brackeen said.
He encouraged his fellow alders to be part of the solution to school maintenance problems and lauded the city and district for all they have managed to accomplish during the pandemic.
“As far as I’m concerned, the level of competency in the health department, the Community Services Administration and the Board of Education has been raised to a level I haven’t experienced in my time as a lifelong New Havener. The fact that this discussion was raised and acknowledged that there needs to be an annual review. Some of these things have been asked for for years,” Brackeen said.
"As far as I'm concerned, the level of competency in the health department, the Community Services Administration and the Board of Education has been raised to a level I haven't experienced in my time as a lifelong New Havener." -Bracken
That's a strong endorsement of Elicker.