Hartford
If the School Board approves the proposals, voters will decide at March Town Meeting whether to spend the money to fix up a crumbling parking lot at Hartford High School, and to fix up the 100-year-old Wilder School, which currently houses about two dozen students from various towns in Hartford’s Regional Alternative Program.
“We don’t have firm numbers, but I will be bringing firm numbers to the meeting on Dec. 14,” DeBalsi said on Thursday.
One unknown is the cost for a parking lot renovation project that would completely overhaul the blacktopped surfaces of the main district campus, which includes the high school, Hartford Memorial Middle School and the Hartford Area Career and Technology Center.
“We’d be digging up what we have, putting in the proper drainage, putting in the proper underlay, and redesigning the roads to make the flow a little better,” DeBalsi said.
In recent years, the parking lot has been the butt of jokes by student speakers at graduation ceremonies, and part of campaign promises by School Board candidates, who worried that the rough ride over the blacktop provides a poor first impression to families considering sending their students to the district.
DeBalsi said the rough surface also creates a safety hazard.
“We’ve had a few injuries in the parking lot based on people falling,” he said.
In 2015, former School Board member Jeff Arnold estimated that it would cost $1.5 million to fix the parking lot.
DeBalsi told the board during an Oct. 26 meeting that his initial guess is “close to a million dollars,” based on an $850,000 estimate he received three years ago for a slightly less comprehensive project.
At that time, DeBalsi also presented a less expensive alternative that would simply resurface the existing blacktop, which was rejected because it still cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and would serve as a short-term fix that would likely last between five and 10 years.
“The Board wasn’t interested, and I understood, because it was delaying the pain,” DeBalsi said. “To fix it right is expensive, and it’s going to be a bond.”
DeBalsi is also gathering information for a potential bond to renovate the Wilder School. Built in 1912, the school’s original purpose of serving neighborhood students ended when the district combined those children into the nearby Dothan Brook School, and the Norwich Avenue building currently houses a Regional Alternative Program for students.
“I have to put it forward, because I think we’re heading for a real emergency,” DeBalsi said.
He compared the scope of the project to a $4.9 million overhaul of the Hartford Town Hall.
“It needs a complete rebuild, basically gutting it, putting a new heating system in it, … putting an elevator in it, putting on a new roof, windows, steps outside, and it’s going to be very expensive,” DeBalsi said. “But I think we have to do it.”
DeBalsi said that the furnace is on its “last legs,” and that he feared having to dip into contingency funds this year, if it should fail.
The students in the program, one of five such regional programs in the state, come from 16 sending districts, and have not been successful in a more traditional classroom environment.
When DeBalsi raised the issue with the School Board during the October meeting, members Peter Merrill and Nancy Russell said they were uncomfortable with providing the students at the Wilder School with a lesser educational environment than the district’s other students.
“I care considerably about the fact that we are, at the moment, because of the multiplicity of problems, treating the students in those properties as second (class) citizens in our school district,” Merrill said. “We are obligated to find a way to provide for them the same way we provide for any other members of the school district. That’s my overwhelming, overarching desire, is that we find some way to address that particular issue.”
“I hadn’t thought about that until Peter said that,” School Board member Nancy Russell said, “and it’s really kind of sticking in my craw now.”
The district also hosts the Hartford Autism Regional Program, which currently pays rent to a third party for a facility on Palmer Court, where educators teach about a dozen students. Running both programs out of the Wilder School would allow HARP to pay rent to the district instead, which would undercut the cost of the bond.
DeBalsi said he is also working on cost estimated for the renovation, but has used the working figure of $4 million for purposes of discussion.
“If it was a $4 million project and bond payments were $200,000 a year, we feel like we could probably use rent payments from the two programs … to pay two-thirds to three-quarters of the bond payment,” with the remainder being paid by taxpayers, he said.
DeBalsi said that closing the Wilder School property and building a new facility would cost close to the same amount of money. Board members asked for more clarity on the option of selling the property.
Chairwoman Lori Dickerson expressed concern about the timeline of vetting and approving a recommendation to the community in time to get it on the March ballot; the Town Hall project, she noted, went to taxpayers only after years of planning.
Matt Hongoltz-Hetling can be reached at mhonghet@vnews.com or 603-727-3211.