Andrew Martins, Managing Editor
An effort to get a head start on rectifying an air conditioning issue throughout the Hillsborough Township Public School District stumbled at the starting line earlier this week, as officials balked at the initial batch of qualifying bids.
During a special meeting of the Hillsborough Township Board of Education on Monday, Schiff announced that the qualifying bids received for a window air conditioning project at Auten Road Intermediate School came in roughly “50 percent higher” than the district’s initial estimates for the project.
Officials said the district had anticipated to spend upwards of $300,000 for the project, but the lowest qualifying bid, submitted by Hanna’s Mechanical Contractors, Inc., came in at $457,750.
As a result, the school board opted to table the potential acceptance of any bids for the project until the next meeting on August 21.
Though the bids were unexpectedly high, Schiff said the district has enough in its capital reserve that “if the board chooses to fund the project, we can assign additional funds.”
Schiff said the project only focused on existing cooling issues at ARIS and that air conditioning problems at the other eight schools have not yet been addressed. ARIS was chosen to receive the repairs first, he said, due to special circumstances surrounding the school.
“One of our most difficult buildings was ARIS, so that’s why we wanted to get to that first,” he said. “It dismisses the latest, so the building heats up more and that was why I wanted this special meeting. I wanted to get this going a few weeks ahead of what was anticipated.”
The push to get air conditioning work started comes nearly a year after unseasonably warm temperatures resulted in classrooms that were uncomfortably hot for students and teachers during the first week of classes.
Without consistent air conditioning throughout the district’s nine schools, teachers and staff were forced to use different methods to keep students cool, including cycling classrooms through existing air conditioned areas, such as school libraries or auditoriums.
The issue came up again near the end of the school year when outside temperatures rose in June. At that time, the district implemented a rotating schedule for teachers to sign up for so their classrooms could go into the aforementioned air conditioned areas.
With the start of the 2017-18 school year quickly approaching and no bids accepted for the ARIS project, a possibility still remains that classrooms can again become excessively warm.
According to the superintendent, the HVAC woes at ARIS were “never to be completed prior to school,” stating that the district’s estimate for completion was some time in November.
“We’re far away from getting air conditioning [in all of the schools]…I wanted to try to start, because I knew it was a rolling process where we would start to cool some classrooms as quickly as possible,” Schiff said.
Along with air conditioning problems, the district also faced heating problems in its schools during the colder months. Unlike the air conditioning problem, Schiff said he was confident that problems with the heating system have since been addressed.
“We invested a lot in rectifying some of those issues. Some of them were mechanical, some of them were controls, but we are optimistic that most of those issues had been resolved as we were fixing them,” he said. “Some schools have older machines that will still need preventative maintenance and upkeep. When we have a problem, we will have to fix it.”
