MASSENA — As capital project work continues in the Massena Central School District, the district’s architectural firm is undertaking a building condition survey that’s due to the state Education Department by March 1 and could point out possible work needed in a future project.
“The New York State Education Department requires a survey to be done every five years,” Edward Bernhauer, an architect with IBI Group, the district’s architectural firm, told Board of Education members.
He said, prior to this year, all school districts in New York submitted their surveys online at the same time.
“The problem that they’ve had once they’ve gone to digital submission… they actually experienced a number of different issues with the website crashing on their end trying to maintain and deal with all of the submissions at the exact same time,” he said.
Survey submissions are now staggered starting this year, and Mr. Bernhauer said Massena was in the first group selected to submit its paperwork.
A building condition survey is required for each occupied educational building in the district, and he said the IBI Group has completed the field work and will submit the form online by the March 1 deadline. A five-year plan for the district will be completed for future use after their building condition survey has been submitted. That will identify physical needs in the buildings and the associated cost to address those issues.
“Your architects and engineers go out and survey the conditions of all of your educational occupied buildings. We basically create a report for state Education Department that does two things. One, it basically says, ‘All right, you’ve done the field work in these buildings and here is the existing condition to evaluate health, safety, welfare issues and also maintenance issues and maintaining your facilities.’ But in addition to that, it also plans out what you’re looking at for future capital projects and what will be the cost of those projects. So there’s really kind of two parts to it,” Mr. Bernhauer said.
Anything that is marked unsatisfactory has to be addressed in the next capital project. A satisfactory rating “is a little bit more at the discretion of the district,” he said.
He said the five-year plan is “kind of the master plan for the school district. It takes all of this information that’s gathered from the existing building condition survey and organizes it with costs. It also projects forward as to how would the district approach any of the renovations that we’ve identified that are needed, how would you schedule that out over the next five years.”
He said, while the five-year plan “doesn’t really get submitted per se by a particular date to the state Education Department,” the plan’s executive summary is used whenever the district submits a capital project to SED for review and approval.
“You use your current executive summary and that goes along with the capital improvements project so that SED knows this isn’t a project out of the middle of anywhere. It’s actually based off what your facility needs are, addressing certain facility needs,” Mr. Bernhauer said.
The district is paying IBI Group $41,500 for the work.
“It’s money that is aidable because it’s considered capital project work,” Superintendent Patrick Brady said.
The state aid reimbursement is “at least 80 percent,” he said.
