Mars school board hopes to start elementary project in October
ADAMS TWP. — Barring further setbacks, Mars Area School District residents can expect the elementary school project to be completed by December 2026 and the building to be open by January 2027.
The district’s school board will reopen the bidding process starting Sept. 1, anticipating construction on the roughly $24 million expansion and renovation project to begin this October.
The board was updated on the bidding plan at its Tuesday, July 22, meeting.
This comes after the project was delayed in May, when the school board rejected all construction-related bids for the project at a special meeting. The bids were rejected largely due to cost concerns.
At the time, the board had project manager Jon Thomas and lead architect Mark Scheller rebid the project with more specifics regarding what the board wants.
The elementary school project is by far the largest of multiple capital projects the school district wants to complete in the upcoming months and years.
Originally, the project was expected to start this month and be completed sometime in the summer of 2026.
“The construction would start in October, and that of course would not leave enough time for the addition to get done before the start of school next year. So I’ve let it extend out to Christmas break, thinking the addition will finish up, and then you’d be able to make the entire change over to operating the addition,” Thomas said.
Thomas said in the process of preparing for new bids, redesigns have been done that, though nothing major was changed, made some minor tweaks to the plan.
However, Thomas and the board hope to save between $4 and $5 million compared to previous bids in the next round of bidding.
The board expects to receive a presentation from Scheller at one of its August board meetings.
“We’re going to get you back to not being over budget. That’s why there was a delay,” Thomas said. “You were about $4 to $5 million over budget, so this process we’ve gone through is to reel that back in. And the time it took to reel us back in, it took from starting construction in June to starting in October.”
Mars’ business manager Debbie Brandstetter previously said the district is still planning for a $10 million bond issue for project funding toward the end of 2025.
