Dear USD 105 Community,
I hope you are enjoying your snow day. Hopefully, we will be back in school soon as we miss having our students and staff in school. I wanted to give an update on the status of the building project. The drawings of the new school were completed by SPT Architecture and McCown-Gordon sent the drawings to bid. Unfortunately, the bids came back significantly higher than expected, which led to the project being over budget. With the higher bids, it was recommended that the district delay the start of construction until a plan could be developed to address the budget overages.
As we have moved through the process, we have found that some of the overages can be attributed to aligning a part of the scope of the project into the correct budget item. This realignment has helped decrease the costs of the budget overages, but the project is still facing a significant budget overage. With this information, the architects and construction manager have been working to reduce costs that do not affect the quality of the project or what was promised to voters in the bond election. The first area that has been reviewed is items in the construction that the general public wouldn’t notice unless you were highly involved in the project. This may mean that a tile that was planned for a staircase was reduced or that a different flooring is used on the walking track. There are many situations of the above example that will help with the costs of the budget overage.
The budget overages cannot be addressed entirely with the recommendations above. This will mean that the Board of Education will have to look at alternatives to the floor plan of the building. Some areas of the building may be reduced and/or moved to a different location. Currently, the Board, SPT Architecture, and McCown-Gordon Construction are working through those plans. It may also mean that a part of the plans may be placed as an alternate to be addressed at a later date. The alternates are meant to be areas of the building that do not have to be decided on to get construction started and can be added later if funds are available.
I know this is difficult news and I want to ensure the community that the USD 105 School District is working, along with SPT Architecture and McCown-Gordon Construction, to meet the promises made during the bond election that the new building will be of high quality and will meet the needs of our community for the next several generations.
Sincerely,
Eric Stoddard
Superintendent
USD 105-Rawlins County