School district wants to remove trailers, fix cardio room error
By Joanne Degnan, Managing Editor
ALLENTOWN — The trailers that housed the Upper Freehold Regional Board of Education and district administrative offices for 27 years may be too expensive to repair, but getting rid of them apparently won’t be cheap either.
Schools Superintendent Richard Fitzpatrick told the Board of Education on Sept. 21 that the estimates the district has received for the removal of the trailers range from $28,400 to $30,000.
”That would be for disconnecting the utilities, attaching the wheels — there would be some welding involved there — and moving them off site to where they could be dismantled at a place that does this for salvage,” Dr. Fitzpatrick said.
The mature landscaping now surrounding the trailers, which are located along the driveway that connects the elementary school to the high school campus, would not be disturbed when the trailers are taken away, Dr. Fitzpatrick said.
”My recommendation is to turn the area into a park,” Dr. Fitzpatrick said. “It’s beautifully shaded and could be an oasis in the campus.”
The Board of Education and district administrative offices moved out of the trailers to vacant space on the second floor of Newell Elementary School just before the start of school in September. The space at the elementary school became available because the new Stone Bridge Middle School opened last year.
Dr. Fitzpatrick said the district’s director of buildings and grounds, Hersey Mayeux, had told him it would be too expensive to repair the portable trailers that have housed the district’s administration for nearly three decades. The floors and roof needs to be replaced and the malfunctioning HVAC system has been jury-rigged so many times that obtaining parts to fix it is difficult, he said.
In other news from the Sept. 21 meeting, Dr. Fitzpatrick told the school board that the district may need to spend about $5,000 to fix a problem with the HVAC in the new cardio-weight room at Allentown High School.
”We have a situation that has developed as a result of incorrect information that our former architect had at the time the plans were made for the cardio-weight room,” Dr. Fitzpatrick told the board.
The original plans had called for large double doors to separate the existing weight room from an adjoining storage area that was being retrofitted with ventilation and safety improvements so that it could be used as a cardio-exercise room. However, a last-minute change by the district removed the doors so the weight room and cardio room would be open to one another and serve as one large open space.
”Doors were expensive to put in and it made no sense to put in doors if you were just going to push them back with a door stop,” Dr. Fitzpatrick said.
”But because we chose not to put in doors, we have uncooled space on one side (in the weight room) and cooled space on the other side (in the new cardio room) with no barrier.”
The district’s former architect agreed to make the change to the plans and remove the doors because he mistakenly believed that the existing weight room already had air-conditioning.
”Unfortunately, the unit in the weight room does not have the capacity to cool the air and cannot be modified,” Dr. Fitzpatrick said. “Hersey has contacted our new architect and believes the that if we make that repair in the weight room, the coupling of the cardio-weight room will work just fine.”
Dr. Fitzpatrick said the current situation is causing moisture to build up in the weight room side.
”There have been signs of mold development which has been arrested and remediated,” Dr. Fitzpatrick said. “However, we are concerned that if we don’t do something, it will be a health issue that we’ll have to face.”
School Business Administrator Diana Schiraldi said the district’s new architect, James Nicholas, would be asked to come up with a plan for fixing the problem. A professional service contract for Mr. Nicholas to provide “architect services and facility consulting services” was approved at the Sept. 21 meeting.
”We will have our architect give us a cost estimate and see if we want to move forward and see if we have to submit it to the Department of Education,” Ms. Schiraldi said. “It’s just something that is in the beginning stages.”
The cardio-weight room, which opened in September, was a $168,662 project funded in part by a $67,465 state grant. The school district was responsible for the remaining $101,197.