New-Look New Haven

New Haven School District Receiving Major Overhaul

Ten years on the same project with many of the same team players does have advantages.

Such is the case in New Haven, Conn., where construction crews combined with city and school officials and neighborhood groups have undertaken what amounts to one of the most unique rebuilding school district projects in the nation. When done in 2012, this 15-year, $1.5 billion plan will have resulted in 22 new buildings and 25 renovated ones, most of them with the most up-to-date construction technologies and standards available.

“We’ve had the ability to learn and raise the bar together, learning from our mistakes so that everyone is high up on the learning curve in terms of what works and doesn’t,” says Thomas Rogér, program director for Providence, R.I.-based Gilbane Construction Co., which oversees the citywide project.

That process, which includes study sessions after each building is completed, has led to a flexibility and willingness to adopt new strategies over the years, he adds. He says two of the new strategies have included energy modeling to ensure schools are as efficient as possible and third-party commissioning to guarantee the schools gain the full value from complex systems being installed.

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“We’ve taken the best practices of every successive generation of buildings and programmed them into the next generation,” Roger says.

The project’s genesis began soon after John DeStefano Jr. was elected mayor in 1993. One of his top priorities was working with Schools Superintendent Reginald Mayo to bring the city’s aging schools up to code.

Many of the schools also had deteriorated over the years because costly maintenance programs were deferred. The newest schools dated from the 1960s, and some were more than 100 years old.

A study was commissioned, but along the way, officials and residents of this city of about 125, 000 suggested that, besides just dealing with code violations, schools should be built for teachers and students in the 21st Century.

Pre-kindergarten classes, for example, were added to elementary schools, and middle schools—grades six through eight—were eliminated and incorporated into elementary schools, a move that teachers and many parents advocated. Some schools lacked proper gymnasiums or cafeterias.

New magnet schools and high schools were built to reduce the size of the comprehensive high schools, and schools were redesigned to accommodate neighborhood programs held in the buildings or on the playgrounds year-round.

“The existing 3 million sq ft of school facilities simply did not fit the educational program we needed to deliver to our kids,” DeStefano says. “Our facilities were expensive to operate and maintain, and in many respects we were failing our kids and teachers.”

With the state of Connecticut funding at least 80% of the project (and in some cases more), New Haven began work in 1998 in the largest such project in Connecticut and the largest in the U.S. on a per-capita basis,  Rogér says.

Over the past decade, 26 schools have been completed, including 2.5 million sq ft of renovated or new construction space at a cost of $802 million, according to Susan Weisselberg, school construction coordinator for New Haven’s Board of Education. Six more are in design or about to be designed, two are pending state approval and seven more smaller projects (ranging from $1 million to $15 million each) are being proposed.

Along with funding much of the school construction projects, Connecticut reimburses the city 95% for construction-related expenses, including design fees and site acquisition costs for interdistrict magnet schools, largely because state officials want to encourage greater racial diversity in Connecticut’s urban cores.

New Haven now has 14 interdistrict magnet schools with 1,221 out-of-district students. That’s an increase from the nine magnet schools New Haven had before the rebuilding project began.

To accomplish all of the new building and renovations, 19 different architectural firms and nine different construction managers have been employed, allowing widespread participation throughout the region and state. Many participants interviewed say that one of the first key steps was bringing on Gilbane as program manager to serve as a liaison between construction teams and municipal and state officials.

Weisselberg, who coordinates contact with state and municipal officials, says a 15-member school building committee, chaired by DeStefano, approves all school designs and recommends projects for state funding.

The program’s motto is “Kids First,” and throughout the project, school and city officials have wanted creative and exciting ideas. One came from internationally respected architect Cesar Pelli, whose New Haven-based firm Cesar Pelli & Associates Architects designed a new Cooperative Arts & Humanities high school on a two-acre downtown parcel. The $58 million, 140,000-sq-ft school, which will accommodate 650 students, plans to open this year.

Another school, Barnard Environmental Studies Magnet School, has applied for LEED gold certification, and many of the other schools completed in the last three years also meet LEED certification requirements, Rogér says.

Looking for ways to cut energy costs, officials turned to Jim Dolan, a principal at Hawthorne, N.Y.-based OLA Consulting Engineers. He in turn introduced the city to energy modeling, a computer-based tool that simulates a building’s energy use throughout an entire year of operation.

Now “we’re modeling every project, using the same methodology used by LEED,” Dolan says.

Project officials have been so impressed with the results that they’ve gone back and applied the modeling tool to earlier buildings. “We came up with a long list of improvements we could make to bring them up to that standard, and we went back and got the money [from the state],” Rogér says. “Now, 80% of them have been done using that program.”

Barry Svigals, a principal at New Haven-based Svigals + Partners, a firm that is on its fourth school project, adds that many sustainable principles “cost nothing, such as how you orient the school to get the biggest solar gain. And more and more, the market is stepping up to provide architects with a wide range of choices of materials that are not more expensive than conventional ones.”

Svigals adds that maintenance and operating costs of a school building amount to 85% of the building’s overall cost, and so spending more money on the performance of mechanical systems up front will save money in the long run.

The citywide project has faced hurdles. Because there’s little vacant land, finding new sites for new construction has often been an issue. One school project at the Worthington Hooker School was delayed for more than two years because of a zoning dispute over a church the city bought and planned to re-use as an auditorium

The Pelli project also was delayed when the initial downtown site—a larger Yale-owned parking lot—wasn’t available.

Staying within a budget also remains a constant challenge, one reason why value engineering has become so popular, says Joe Luciano, a senior project manager with Branford, Conn.-based Giordano Construction Co., who has been involved since 1999 when he managed an addition and renovation at Hillhouse High School. “We’re getting architects to design exciting buildings coupled with trying to meet established budgets,” says Luciano, who is on his fourth project.

He adds that construction managers like him have learned how to value engineer and stay within budget. He points to the renovation and expansion of the Nathan Hale Elementary School, which he brought in under budget and earned an American Institute of Architects award in 2003 for the designs by Herbert S. Newman and Partners of New Haven.

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