Alamance-Burlington school board members voted unanimously during their latest work session Tuesday afternoon to approve $13.9 million in contracts to complete facility repairs and security upgrades that are funded by several sources of revenue available to ABSS.
The biggest-ticket item was an $8.9 million contract that the board voted unanimously to award to Greensboro-based Samet Corporation to complete the design and preconstruction phase for heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning upgrades at nine ABSS schools.
School board members had voted unanimously to award a “design-build” contract to Samet (essentially hiring it as the design firm) at a special-called meeting on July 22. The list of projects to be completed and the estimated budget for each school were outlined on the contract for preconstruction and design services that the board approved Tuesday afternoon.
The HVAC upgrades will be funded by a portion of the remaining $19.5 million in proceeds from the $150 million bond package that voters approved for ABSS in November 2018. Alamance County commissioners voted 4-1 last month to shift the proceeds from the latest bond issue into a capital projects fund that the county maintains for the school system.
The contract with Samet covers design work for HVAC upgrades at the following schools: Alexander Wilson, B. Everett Jordan, Haw River, Hillcrest, and Smith elementary schools; and Eastern, Graham, Southern, and Western high schools. The individual estimated budgets for the HVAC upgrades at each school range between $200,000 (for the smaller elementary schools) and $1.7 million (for larger high schools such as Eastern and Southern), based on contracts provided for the school board’s review.
These HVAC upgrades were part of a list of the Top 10 high-priority projects that Alamance County government officials identified for the school system earlier this year, ABSS chief operations officer Greg Hook confirmed for The Alamance News prior to the work session.
Hook told the school board Tuesday that the initial contracts with Samet are for HVAC design and pre-construction services only; and he will need to present another contract with Samet stipulating the guaranteed maximum price for all of the work at a future meeting.
A study of the school system’s HVAC systems that the county commissioned and bankrolled last fall had “identified a lot of old equipment,” Hook explained to school board members Tuesday. “At Graham High, a lot of those are over 30 years old; in the case of those four large high schools [Eastern, Southern, Western, and Williams], the systems that we put in will have the ability to run dehumidifiers and do fresh air intake.”
For some of the smaller elementary schools, the projects will consist of replacing boilers and chillers, Hook said. “[At] B.E. Jordan, Alexander Wilson, Smith, and Hillcrest, [it’s] just replacing the chiller outdoors so we will have a chiller that’s not going to break down.”
Roofing projects
School board members also voted unanimously, 7-0, Tuesday afternoon to award four contracts totaling $398,242 to REI of Raleigh to complete roofing design work and administer construction contracts at four schools. They include: South Mebane Elementary (design/administration, $72,112); Southern Middle (design/construction administration, $60,300); Eastern High (administration, $141,329); and Western High School (administration, $124,501), based on the contracts approved Tuesday.
The board also voted to award a $3.7 million contract to Bar Roofing & Maintenance of Kernersville to replace deteriorating roofing materials at Southern High School, which also will be funded by the remaining proceeds from the 2018 bond package. There was no discussion about why the roofing repairs weren’t reported or included in the extensive renovations and expansion at Southern High School that wrapped up in the fall of 2022.
Hook told the newspaper prior to Tuesday’s work session that Alamance County officials “have already budgeted for” the use of the $19.5 million in bond proceeds for the HVAC and roofing projects covered under the contracts subsequently approved by the school board.
Meanwhile, another roof repair project at Graham Middle School that had already gotten underway this spring will be presented during an upcoming meeting of the county’s joint capital oversight committee (OSC) to discuss Hook’s request to redirect funds from one project to an unexpected cost overrun in the initial budget for the Graham Middle roofing project.
The school board had voted in December 2023 to award a $1.3 million contract for the Graham Middle School roof project to Triad Roofing of Winston-Salem.
However, it wasn’t until the work actually started that crews discovered extensive structural damage to the existing roofing materials, Hook told school board members during an earlier discussion. Fixing those problems will require additional engineering services to replace layers of roofing materials that have crumbled and caved in, demonstrated by photos that the COO presented to the board in late June.
Hook said this week that, while the additional construction design and contract administration services will require another $462,733, the Southern High School roofing project is currently $900,000 under budget.
“I recommend asking OSC and [the commissioners] to redirect funds from that project to cover the change order [for Graham Middle],” Hook told the newspaper prior to the school board’s work session. “This will keep [a separate state allocation for capital repairs and renovations] intact for an emergency or to apply to something additional” on the county’s list of top priority facility needs for ABSS, he added.
Security upgrades
School board members also voted 7-0 during their work session to approve two contracts, totaling $573,468, with KNC Technologies of Winston-Salem to replace security cameras and install keyless entry systems that will be used by the staffs at Eastern and Graham high schools.
KNC Technologies was also awarded four other contracts totaling $376,559.373 to complete security upgrades at multiple ABSS schools on Tuesday afternoon. Those projects consist of replacing security software at multiple schools, as well as replacing camera servers at Graham and Turrentine middle schools, along with Ray Street Academy, based on the contracts that Hook presented for the board’s approval.
“This funding was approved by the county and is in place,” Hook assured school board members during their work session. “These are necessary because the cameras on the big high schools are about 10 years old. A lot of them were taken down during remodeling, plus a lot of them are old.”
However, use of the keyless door entry systems to be installed at Eastern and Graham high schools will be limited to school employees, Hook told the board. “Students will not have a card, so school staffs will have to determine how they’re going to provide entry – but they’ll be equipped with a [call] button and a camera. If they push the button, the person in the office can see them and speak with them.”
The security-related upgrades will be funded by a portion of the “PayGo” capital funding that Alamance County’s commissioners allocated to ABSS for the current 2024-25 fiscal year that began July 1.
School board members voted 7-0 to approve most of the contracts Tuesday afternoon.
However, the vote to approve the contract with KNC to replace security camera software at multiple schools and to install camera servers and software at Ray Street Academy and Graham and Turrentine middle schools was 6-0, as school board chairman Sandy Ellington-Graves had stepped out of the meeting room at Central Office briefly, just before a motion to approve was introduced.
Status of county funding for school repairs and maintenance
The commissioners allocated a total of $4.96 million in county capital funding for ABSS this fiscal year, which includes $3,575,000 in “PayGo” funding and approximately $1.4 million for technology-related upgrades, Hook confirmed for the newspaper this week.
The COO pointed out that the contracts that the school board ultimately approved Tuesday afternoon will allow ABSS to start working on the list of roofing and HVAC priorities that county officials had identified earlier this year, as well as start whittling away at the ongoing, routine maintenance projects that he’d presented to the school board this spring.
The HVAC projects that county officials identified for ABSS total $8.9 million; the roofing projects (including some to be completed at other schools later) total $12.8 million, based on a breakdown that Hook presented to the school board Tuesday afternoon. Both categories of repairs will be funded by proceeds from school bonds the county issued in 2021 and 2024.
