A Long List
Butler School District administrators are preparing to address leaking roofs, asbestos, peeling paint and other items on a long list of capital needs.
To pay for these urgently needed repairs, the school board last year voted to borrow $9.6 million through a bond issue.
On Monday night, in lieu of a regular school board meeting, board members and district administrators and employees took a tour of several buildings to see the problems that need to be corrected and get information that will help them decide how to budget the borrowed money.
Superintendent Brian White said the district will have to seek bids and get board approval for many of the larger projects. Some of the less costly projects will be done at the discretion of the administration, though the school board will be informed.
At Butler Senior High School, the district is planning to deal with asbestos floor tiles in the auditorium, peeling paint on the floor of the gymnasium and leaking concrete below the swimming pool, White said.
A snack booth in the cafeteria has been identified as a tripping hazard and also obstructs the view of monitors during lunch periods — and the district plans to remove it this summer, he said.
Bill Mylan, Butler athletic director, showed the board several athletic facilities that he would like to see renovated or expanded, including the locker rooms.
The locker rooms in the senior high school were built before Title IX was put into effect requiring equal offerings for boys and girls. The boys' side has a team locker room and a physical education locker room, while the girls' side only has one big locker room. A shower curtain was put in to create two separate areas.
During sporting events, a visiting girls team will sometimes use one of the boys locker rooms and a person will need to stand guard to make sure that no one walks in on them, Mylan said.
“It's a logistical nightmare,” he said.
The board also heard about deteriorating concrete at the entrance to the athletic stadium and broken cardio equipment.
Matt Hansen, architect with IKM, said that the rifle range in the basement of the senior high is not wheelchair accessible and does not abide by best practices used at many school shooting ranges, such as having a secure ammunition room and more deflectors to prevent bullets from ricocheting back at students.
The board also visited the Butler Middle School. Built in 1917, it is the district's oldest building.The building, the former Butler Junior High School, has a leaking roof, which has caused damage to structural steel and caused leaking ceilings. But to repair the roof, there would need to be asbestos abatement done, which would make it an especially costly job, White said.Another issue is that the school slowly sinks into the ground and the district has had to pay to lift it up two times in recent years.The district earlier this year hired IKM and asked it to assess some of its building needs, including the middle school.While that study is still being done, White said Monday night that the district will need to decide if it is worth investing millions into the aging building.“The question we will need to ask is 'is the capital investment worth the building we own?'” White said.Hansen said that the middle school's antiquated boilers and ventilation system makes it very energy inefficient compared to most schools of a similar size.Hansen said that his firm calculated an energy rating for the school based on its last three years of utility bills. The ratings go from 1 to 100 and a school would need a 75 to earn EnergyStar certification. The middle school got a 17.“You're pumping tons of energy into this school and you're getting minimal efficiency in return,” he said.When the district borrowed the money, some of the costly projects it was weighing included $1 million for roof replacement at the senior high school, $950,000 for a roof replacement at Center Township Elementary School, $550,000 for stadium turf replacement and about $500,000 each for roof replacements at Emily Brittain, Connoquenessing and Center Avenue schools.The district also refinanced some of its older debt late last year, which meant that the payments on the new bond issue did not immediately affect the annual budget.The term of the bond is 18 years and the district expects to pay $5.349 million in interest over its term.
