Shrinking, Decaying Schools Getting New Playgrounds

The Board of Education has signed off on spending $342,677 on new playgrounds at Wexler Grant and Brennan Rogers Schools — two schools with such low enrollments and rundown buildings that they may close in the near future.

The school board approved change orders related to those playground upgrades to several middle schools during its June 24 meeting. The change order included fixes to the Brennan Rogers playground, to the tune of $170,185.57, and fixes to the Wexler Grant playground, at a cost of $172,492.

That vote took place as New Haven Public Schools (NHPS) works to fill a $2 million general fund budget deficit for the 2024 – 25 school year and questions from the community and city alders continue about the districts’ school consolidation plans. NHPS must also now figure out which facility upgrades to prioritize going forward, and how it can afford major investments at decaying school buildings.

Meanwhile, Wexler Grant and Brennan Rogers have the lowest enrollment numbers of any K‑8 school in the district. According to data obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, Brennan Rogers had a total of 203 students enrolled by the end of the last school year. Wexler Grant had 217. (The highest-enrollment K‑8 school in the district was Fair Haven School, with 843 students as of June.)

The Wexler Grant and Brennan Rogers school buildings are also in need of serious repair, according to NHPS’ January school building planning study focused on enrollment, building utilization and conditions, and spatial needs. Click here to view the full report and here for the report summary. The board of ed plans to spend the upcoming year figuring out which schools to close the following year; low-enrollment schools with rundown buildings are considered prime targets.

“Both Wexler Grant and Brennan Rogers are aging buildings,” NHPS spokesperson Justin Harmon told the Independent. ​“The district has lacked funding for the regular maintenance that all of our school buildings should have. Across the district, repairs have been made as systems break. This is the pattern we are working to change; doing so will require the planning and resources.”

Harmon also stressed that the district has not yet selected any particular schools to close; that means that Wexler Grant and Brennan Rogers are not definitely on the chopping block.

Harmon added that the district’s highest priority repairs address conditions that could affect health and safety. Those include repairs to HVAC systems, boilers, security systems, and roofs.

The question of how school playground repairs fit into the district’s broader capital improvement efforts, as well as the likelihood of school buildings to close in the not-too-distant future, most recently came up for discussion during Thursday’s Board of Education Finance and Operations Committee meeting.

Committee Chair and school board Vice President Matt Wilcox urged the district to look sooner rather than later into the approved playground upgrades at Edgewood, King/Robinson, Nathan Hale, Martinez, Wexler Grant, and Brennan Rogers.

“We have so few dollars, we should be making sure that every dollar we’re investing is in a building we want to continue to invest in,” he said, ​“not just for this fiscal year but of the next several.”

He added, ​“I think that we might want to look at pausing some projects until some of these things are known.”

The playground projects were approved for extended end dates in late June by the Board of Education. At a June 17 F&O meeting, ABM Executive Director of Facilities Jamar Alleyne explained, ​“the expectation is that these projects will be done by December.”

The playground upgrades were initially set to be complete by the end of the 2023 – 24 school year. But when they weren’t, the full Board of Education approved the extended end dates of June 30, 2025 for the projects.

At the June meeting, Alleyne said, ​“the projects just have not moved for various reasons. It could be questions on completion date, questions on funding sources.” He added that each project is expected to take a total of 17 weeks for delivery materials, preparation time and complete construction.

According to NHPS’ July 11 Citywide School Building & Stewardship Committee report, the Edgewood and King/Robinson playgrounds are delayed due to ​“reevaluating priorities associated with capital dollars” while the others are still in process.

A Jan. 25 memo provided to the school board’s F&O committee detailed the Wexler Grant playground improvement costs as including the removal of approximately 8,100 suqare feet of playground flooring, resurfacing with rubber, installation of new equipment, and the demolition and removal of the existing playground.

With past requests from alders to hear the district’s consolidation plans, Wilcox said local legislators likely will want to consider the district’s consolidation efforts before signing off on any new capital spending plan. ​“They don’t want to invest in buildings that we’re gonna then turn around and sell,” he said.

He concluded that his comments are also with the understanding that ​“we still have schools that need to run and children need access to services, and if we have a roof leaking it has to be fixed, I understand that, but major investments maybe we should make sure before we move forward with them.”

Asked for the latest on the district’s school-closure plan, Harmon concluded: ​“A school consolidation plan will be developed after we have conducted an in-depth assessment of buildings and building systems across the district. We will assemble and present those findings to the community. We will then develop both a consolidation plan and a ten-year capital plan that can help ensure that active buildings are properly maintained.”

Meanwhile, according to the Svigals + Partners and S/L/A/M Collaborative (SLAM) school building planning study conducted this school year, Wexler and Brennan Rogers were deemed to be in poor condition. The district paid $395,000 for the study in May 2021.

Superintendent Madeline Negrón told the Independent in July that she aims to tackle building consolidation plans — aka, figuring out which schools to close — after the coming 2024 – 25 school year. She said she needs to first invest in a second facilities study that will more deeply assess district buildings’ mechanical systems.

“A study of population trends and of facilities we conducted last year may have given rise to speculation about the fate of individual school buildings,” Harmon continued in his comment provided to the Independent for this article. ​“We think it is important to emphasize that the facilities assessments were preliminary. We need more comprehensive data about facilities, plus the demographics and an understanding of community needs before we can formulate meaningful proposals. We do not wish to fuel speculation before we have the data necessary to inform the discussion.”

NHPS’ temporary operations consultant Michael Carter provided the F&O committee on Thursday with a draft timeline for another request for proposal (RFP) for the second facilities study. He will use the initial 10-year facilities study to shape the new RFP request.

The timeline details that the drafting of the RFP is expected to take until Oct. 1. Then the posting will be live until Jan. 21, 2025 and a vendor will be selected by March 11.

He added that the dates are not ​“set in stone” and the timeline is expected to be expedited with shorter targets in an attempt to align the newer facilities information with the city’s biennial capital budget process.

Negrón added that the second study is a requirement to allow the district to make the most informed decisions going forward.

“We have to find a way to expedite this process because the issue that we’re going to run into is, we need this work to be carried out so we have sufficient data to inform the conditions of our mechanical systems inside of our buildings,” Negrón said during Thursday’s committee meeting. ​“We then need to have an estimated idea of what the cost will be to do some of the repairs that we are thinking of.”

Without having the necessary data soon, Negrón said she fears, ​“We’re going to miss the mark on trying to advocate for the resources that we need.”

Board and committee member OrLando Yarborough asked Carter if buildings already have data from the recent past on mechanical systems, in an attempt to possibly reduce the RFP work and further expedite the process.

Carter responded that while the first study was ​“insightful” in revealing discoveries — like the fact that the average NHPS building is 21 years old — the last study did not track in detail where each building’s mechanical and electrical systems are in their 20-year life periods or the cost associated with the system upgrades that would be needed for repairs.