School Department to ask for $160,000 for repairs
By Ken Powers Community Reporter

Westborough - At Town Meeting in May, the School Department will present an article requesting the allocation of $160,000 for repairs to four schools in town.

Superintendent Anne Towle presented the proposal, part of the Capital Improvement Plan for the district, to the School Committee at its Jan. 16 meeting. The committee unanimously approved Towle's recommendation.

In the Town Meeting article will be a request for $35,000 to replace duct work at the Armstrong Elementary School, a request for $55,000 for re-pointing at Hastings Elementary School, a request for $35,000 for the installation of a snow fence and ice guards at Mill Pond School, and a request for $35,000 to repair exterior stairs and walkways at the High School.

Towle said safety is first and foremost the reason that all four projects are part of the article.

"The duct work at Armstrong is lined with insulating materials that are original to the building," Towle said. "We need to get those materials out of the duct work in order to clean up and improve the air quality in the school."

Towle said the re-pointing of the brickwork at Hastings was recommended by Brian Schlegel, the district's director of buildings and grounds.

"On the exterior facing of the building, the mortar has broken down," Towle said. "It needs to be scraped out and reapplied. Otherwise water could get into framework of the building and lead to further cracking and, ultimately, leaks in the building."

The erection of a snow fence and ice guards at Mill Pond would be around the gymnasium and office area, and would also address a safety issue, as would the repairing of deteriorated exterior sidewalks and staircases at the High School, Towle explained.

The School Committee also voted unanimously at

" its Jan. 16 meeting to authorize Dan Hendricks, the district's director of finance and administration, to pursue avenues to obtain funding for capital improvements at Gibbons Middle School.

Towle said that project would include meeting with the Massachusetts School Building Authority and the Green Schools project regarding the funding for improvements.

The proposed improvements for Gibbons total $2.325 million.

Included in the list is: $250,000 for electrical upgrades for instructional technology in the 1955 section of the building; $950,000 for the replacement of the building's original windows and the repointing around those windows as the steel frames have begun to deteriorate recently and need to be replaced; $300,000 for the replacement of 20,000 square feet of the roof, which was part of a 1995 addition to the building, the warranty for which expired in 2007; $150,000 for repaving of parking lots; $125,000 for the removing and replacing of an asbestos ceiling; $75,000 to replace bleachers in the gymnasium for safety reasons; $175,000 to upgrade ventilators and controls; and $300,000 to rebuild the soccer field and replace the field house.

"We thought it would be better to see how much help we could get if we bundled all the projects together rather than trying to chip away at it," Towle said.