Jose de Wit
SUN Staff Writer
After at least a year of delays, the Mesa Vista School District has finally received the thumbs up — and critical construction funding — from state planners to begin building El Rito Elementary a new facility.
Superintendent Robert Archuleta said contractors have already finished abating asbestos at the school’s old facility and will start with demolition Wednesday (8/6).
“We’re having a construction meeting Wednesday, and hopefully, we’ll probably have the bulldozers in that day,” Archuleta said.
The state Public School Capital Outlay Council required the District to slash the school’s $9.3 million price tag before it agreed to help fund the project.
The District, along with architect Vigil and Associates and state Public School Facilities Authority Representative Gilbert Ferran, have so far identified $1.5 million that could be cut from the project, bringing the cost down to $7.8 million.
That figure is still too high for the Council — a similarly-sized elementary school recently built outside Socorro cost only $4 million, Authority Director Robert Gorrell said. But the Council has agreed to fund the project anyway because El Rito Elementary’s current location in the gymnasium of Northern New Mexico College is unacceptable, he said.
“(The gym) is just a deplorable place for kids to be in,” Gorrell said.
The Council did not provide a specific amount for the project.
Gorrell said the Council would have expected the District to explore other cost-cutting measures — such as rebidding the project or consolidating the District’s two elementary schools in El Rito — if Northern had allowed the District to lease classroom space in Jaramillo Hall. But either of those options could have delayed construction – and kept El Rito students in Northern’s gym — for yet another year.
“The college has us backed into a corner. Those kids are already losing two years of a good education,” Gorrell said. “The Council couldn’t let that ride, so it basically the state is agreeing to help with more than its share.”
El Rito Elementary students will continue to attend classes in the gymnasium of Northern New Mexico College’s El Rito campus for another school year while construction is underway, Archuleta told the School Board in a meeting Monday. Northern reluctantly agreed to house the school there last school year after District and state planners shut down the school’s old campus at the end of the 2006-07 school year.
The District had requested $5 million in state funding last year for what was then expected to be a $7 million project.
The Council rejected that application and instead gave Mesa Vista only $40,000 to draw up plans for the new school. The project’s cost rose by more than $2 million over the following year.
Though the District would ordinarily be required to contribute $4 million to the $9 million-plus project, it only managed to raise $2.2 million through a bond measure. When the District applied for state construction funding again in late April, it requested $6.8 million from the Council.
A Council subcommittee told Mesa Vista in May to either bring the project’s price down, or consider other options, such as consolidating the District’s two elementary schools in El Rito or rebidding the project. Only one contractor, Blue Sky Builders, placed a bid to build the school.
The District is currently working on change orders to bring down Blue Sky’s original bid of $9.3 million by $1.5 million, Ferran told the Board on Monday.
Ferran said the new school should be completed before the start of the next school year in August 2009. The new, 28,000-square-foot school will include 10 classrooms, one for each class from preschool through sixth grade plus a special education room, Archuleta said.