‘We Have Had Children Injured’: District Reviews Capital Needs at New Canaan Public Schools

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Children using playground equipment at New Canaan Public Schools have been injured because there’s been no proper drainage system installed for the mulch that surrounds it, district officials said this week.

Playground restoration work is “at a critical stage” where additional work must be done in terms of drainage, new mulch and curbing, according to Bob Willoughby, the district’s manager of facilities operations.

While the district inspects its playground equipment annually and makes repairs as needed, “the town supports us with the mulch that goes down, the curbing around them,” Willoughby told members of the Board of Education at their meeting Monday night.

“We think we need to more forward on it rather quickly,” he said at the meeting, held in the Wagner Room at New Canaan High School. “We have had some children injured because of the condition of the mulch.”

Willoughby continued: “We did the South [School] playground and replaced all the curbing and mulch. But we never got the base of the problem. The problem is that there is supposed to be drainage underneath the mulch which takes the water away. So really we have mulch that is sitting in water and it’s deteriorating. So it’s really a rehab. We need to pull it apart, fix it and make it right and make it safer for the children.”

The comments come as the school board puts together its capital and operating budget requests for fiscal year 2018. With less revenue coming in from building permits and several projects—including in land conservation and youth sports—vying for taxpayer dollars, town officials have instructed municipal department heads to keep budgets as flat as possible.

The Board of Ed, the major driver of the budget, is expected to finalize in January its proposed spending plan for next fiscal year.

Willoughby during his presentation reviewed each school’s major capital needs, as well as some district-wide projects. Though the district has been asked to defer some of the work in recent years, that in some cases has meant increasingly deteriorating infrastructure, which in turn has made the capital needs more pressing, Willoughby said.

“As you push them further out, you go into a situation where all the other stuff is getting older and they raise their hand and say, ‘Oops, my turn. I need to get fixed now’ ” he said. “So as we keep deferring these things, we are just creating a logjam. And the big elephants in the room are the underground storage tanks, the roofs and believe it or not, not too far in the distance, paving in all the parking lots.”

Board of Ed Chair Dionna Carlson asked Willoughby in developing the formal capital budget request to estimate the ages of the infrastructure needing work.

“I think it would help as we make determinations, and the town makes determinations,” she said.

School board member Penny Rashin said it may be helpful to note which items have been deferred from past years.

Other major items include the main electrical switchgear that runs to each school and distributes electricity throughout the entire building, Willoughby said. It’s been more than 20 years since the switchgear was looked at, he said.

“We really haven’t done a great job of taking care of our electrical switchgear,” he said. “It needs to be maintained on a regular basis. We have deferred it a few times. We really need to get in there.”

A study recently recommended that the district tighten it up “and make sure we’re not going to have some catastrophic event where the switch gears are going to fail and we are not going to have power in the buildings.”

Willoughby also said that the district’s “alarming” system for problems with infrastructure such as pumps and walk-in freezers should be updated so that a more strident communication goes out automatically to facilities officials when there’s a problem.

In his school-by-school presentation to the board—a summary likely will be made available here—Willoughby also noted that West School lacks “water supply isolation valves.”

“Whenever we have an issue in a bathroom at any of the buildings, I always say ‘Let’s go shut the valve off that’s right outside the bathroom. Shut the water off so we can isolate the bathroom.’ West doesn’t have any valve,” he said. “Any time we have a bathroom issue, we close the bathroom for a period of time, so we can wait until the children are gone and we can shut the water off before we can accomplish a repair. Every time we go and make one of these repairs, we tell them, ‘Put a valve on the pipe that goes into the bathroom while we’ve got it shut down.’ It’s just taken us a long time to get there.”

Asked by Carlson whether the need to wait for kids to be out of West pushes bathroom work into more expensive overtime projects, he said yes.

Here’s a list of what Willoughby covered in his presentation, broken down by school:

District-wide 

  • Engineering services
  • UST emergency maintenance
  • Exhaust fans
  • Main electric switchgear
  • Maintenance vehicle
  • Playground restoration
  • Roof ladders
  • Propane project
  • Alarming

East School

  • Carpet front main office
  • Floor tile repairs
  • Vinyl walls/bumpers cafeteria hallway
  • Classroom ADA sink upgrades
  • Bathroom upgrades, new partitions
  • Domestic hot water
  • Classroom outdoor air dampers

South School

  • Masonry restoration—chimney
  • Carpet front main office
  • Lobby floor repair
  • Classroom ADA millwork
  • Upgrade all old glass fuse panels
  • Corridor ventilation
  • Classroom outdoor air dampers

West School

  • Bathroom ADA requirement
  • Install new gutter guards, whole school
  • Domestic hot water
  • Corridor ventilation
  • Classroom outdoor air dampers
  • Water supply isolation valves—all bathrooms

Saxe Middle School

  • Masonry repairs/repoint brick
  • Playground equipment
  • Cafeteria millwork along windows
  • Corridor ventilation
  • Remaining HVAC valves
  • Boiler expansion tanks
  • Classroom outdoor air dampers

New Canaan High School

  • ADA upgrades to all bathrooms
  • Library new carpet
  • Wagner Room new carpet
  • Cafeteria/kitchen new floor (safety hazard)
  • Auditorium lighting, repairs on control panel
  • Put bus building on emergency power

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