How did Raymond build a new middle school for $10-million less?

This all sounds familiar.

A community struggles for years to develop a political consensus that will allow it to replace an old, broken-down school building that has been housing the middle grades with a contemporary, spacious facility that will allow educators to deliver their education program in the desired manner. The school district has been following a middle school philosophy for some time but the old structure does not naturally lend itself to team teaching and the easy grouping of students, first into grades and then into "teams" within grades.

Finally, the votes necessary to authorize funding are there and it is decided the best course of action is to raze almost all of the old building and build a new one in the same location. Officials want the new structure to be durable and energy efficient and it will have to constructed in phases — over 18 months — so students will not have to be temporarily moved off campus.

Though the size of the current student body does not justify it, school district officials want to include room to grow into so it is decided to build enough space for 650 students, with "core" space — gym, cafeteria, library — for 750.

Laconia?

No. In this case we're talking about Raymond, a town of about 10,000 people, located 15 miles east of Manchester.

Voters in Raymond appropriated $13.8-million to build a new Iber Holmes Gove Middle School in March 2005. Construction began in August of that year and students were using the new classrooms this past fall. The finishing touches on the administrative wing are being completed now and the principal will move into his new office by the end of the month.

The protect is expected to be completed with at least $150,000 to spare.

There are many similarities between what has already happened in Raymond and what is happening now in this city but one of them is, obviously, not cost. The Memorial Middle School project here — being planned for the exact same student capacity — is going to cost a staggering $9.8-million (71-percent) more.

(The total project cost here is $24.4-million but $800,000 of that amount is for athletic field improvements and Raymond faced no comparable costs. For comparison purposes, then, we are pricing the Laconia building project at $23.6-million.)

The Raymond school is being built by the Laconia-based construction firm of Bonnette, Page and Stone (BPS), which has constructed many dozens of New Hampshire schools over the past 38 years. The irony, of course, is that BPS was a part of the three-corner Memorial Middle School design team until two weeks ago, when the City Council/School Board Joint Building Committee voted to change course.

BPS was originally retained last May to help the committee put price tags of the various building options that were being considered but on Oct. 9 the committee voted to retain the firm as the project's construction manager. On Jan. 4, however, the same committee decided to ditch the construction manager model of doing things in favor of the more traditional general contractor/lump-sum-bid model and BPS was out.

The Laconia firm had come in for a great deal of criticism — some of it public — after conceptual drawings for the new school prepared by Architectural Resources Cambridge (ARC) were estimated to have started the project some $2.6-million over budget. Embarrassed officials aimed barbs at BPS, the architect and Rist-Frost Shumway (RFS) — the project's consulting engineers — for publicly assuring them a proper 114,500-square-foot school could be built for the amount authorized but BPS clearly took most of the blame because they were the estimators. The committee even went so far as to hire a independent third-party to re-check the numbers provided from ARC's drawings but the new company's figures came in a couple of hundred thousand dollars higher than BPS's.

Since early November, the committee has been engaged in what is called "value engineering" — deciding what features of the building they can live without in order to get the project back within budget.

Design-build vs. design and then build

Asked last week why the Raymond project could be so much less expensive that Laconia's, BPS President Randy Remick said the most obvious difference was the "delivery system". In Raymond, his company responded to a request for "design-build" proposals that met a specific set of criteria. That is, he was asked how much his company would charge to both design and build the school desired. His bid of about $12.5-million was accepted and, from that moment on, he was in charge — he provided the architect, he hired the engineers and he hired all the sub-contractors.

(BPS was not charged with equipping the new Raymond school. School officials there are spending that $1-million or so budget on their own.)

In Laconia, the School District hired the engineers and architects long before a construction company entered the picture. The architect was chosen in a competition but no monetary bids for architectural and engineering services were reviewed. Later, the building committee agreed to pay RFS and ARC a total of $1.5-million for their services (7.75-percent of the construction budget), or $860,000 more than the engineering and architectural fees Remick budgeted for the Raymond project.

Documents on file at the Raymond school superintendent's office further reveal that BPS expected to clear $398,000 to cover its overhead and provide for a profit. In Laconia they would have been paid $637,000.

Building committee members have said they now expect much of that $637,000 to fall to the bottom line but the eventual general contractor on the job will doubtless want to be paid for providing many of the same services BPS was being counted on for.

Inflation and a larger building

Still, a $1-million difference in professional fees does not begin to account for the huge spread between Raymond and Laconia.

Inflation has to be considered, though Remick said he would happily start the Raymond project over again today for $1.5-million more — a figure that accounts for about 6-percent per year growth.

The Laconia school is bigger and every inch of the school will be new. Originally planned for 118,000-square-feet, the school was downsized to 114,500 to meet objections coming from City Council.

The Raymond school is 107,000-square-feet and that figure includes the 12,000-square-feet of gym space that was renovated rather than rebuilt.

(The only obvious difference in floor plans — to the untrained eye — is the lack of a separate multi-purpose room in the Raymond design. Educators devoted to the middle school concept insist on the value of a common space or spaces for assemblies and team teaching and both plans accommodate that goal through different designs. In Raymond, each self-contained "pod" of classrooms comes complete with a pie-shaped common assembly area that features upholstered benches. The Laconia design also features pods of classrooms but the assembly areas that might have been provided have instead been combined into one large multi-purpose room — with retractable seating — that is located next to the gym. The wall between the gym and the multi-purpose room can be rolled back to accommodate much larger gatherings.)

At $145-per-foot — the $130 construction cost in Raymond plus inflation — it might have cost the southern NH community as much as another $2-million to get to Laconia's building size.

Both budgets include the cost of abating hazardous materials such as asbestos and razing the existing structures and both budgets account for an extended construction time line caused by the need to keep classes in session throughout.

Windows vs. air conditioning

Still, the unaccounted for difference is more than $5-million.

Officials is both communities stated their goal was to reach a "mid-level" of material quality and featured amenities. But exactly what that means is far from obvious.

The new Memorial Middle School, as originally designed by ARC, contained $1.2-million in glass. The facades have been redesigned and that part of the budget has now been cut by nearly $400,000 but it remains far higher than the $115,000 budgeted for windows in Raymond.

The exterior windows in Raymond are a simple two-pane design that measure about 4-feet square. The windows in the current Laconia plan feature a six-pane design and are nearly twice as large.

Laconia School Board member Joe Cormier, who is co-chair of the building committee, said yesterday that he has toured the Raymond school building and was struck by the lack of natural lighting in classrooms. "You can feel it," he said, " And I commented that we need to make sure we have sufficient windows in Laconia."

Non-science classrooms in Raymond came equipped with two lockable wardrobe boxes, while the rooms in Laconia will include the wardrobes plus some build-in storage and cabinet space. The original ARC design included an additional $410,000 worth of built-in book shelves that committee members are hoping to be able to restore at some point.

On the other hand, the Raymond school is completely air-conditioned, a feature that cost them $420,000 beyond the cost of just providing that amenity in the office, library and cafeteria areas.

The gym and administrative offices in Laconia will be air-conditioned, but the classrooms will not be. The building committee recently decided to restore $90,000 worth of dehumidification equipment for the classroom wings to the budget by taking that amount out of contingency.

The walls in the classroom areas in Raymond consist largely of painted cement block, the contemporary standard for durability. Similarly placed walls in Laconia will be composed of sheet rock covering metal wall studs. There has been some talk about making them more durable by adding a layer of protective wainscoting but that feature is presently not in the budget.

Beautiful buildings?

Beauty is always in the eye of the beholder but it could probably be assumed that most critics would deem the architectural design that ARC provided for Laconia to be "nicer" than the one Concord architects Jordan & Baker prepared for Raymond. Of course the budgets were a lot different, too.

In the end, both communities are going to end up with two-story brick buildings that pretty much look like schools are expected to look these days. And Raymond does not appear to be the least bit unhappy with its result.

"People are very pleased," said Raymond school Superintendent Michael Shore. "They are very happy with what they are seeing, it is a nice design and the space is well used."

Windows aside, Cormier too was impressed by what he saw in Raymond. "I liked the layout," he said, "they did nice work."

As far as the bottom line in concerned, Cormier said he thought it somewhat unfair to compare the two projects at this point. "We're comparing our estimates to their actual costs," he added.

Cormier predicted the Laconia price tag could turn out to be substantially lower than estimated because of what is happening in the construction marketplace. "We won't know until the bids (from general contractors) come in," he said.

In any case, Cormier volunteered that his community was going to have "a nice building" that will meet educational needs for many years to come. "And we'll have a lot more windows," he joked.

(Editors note: The idea for this story did not, as you might well imagine, fall out of the sky. The Daily Sun was approached by a small group of parents who brought the Raymond middle school project to our attention and asked us to do a little investigating. Their stated motive was concern that the Memorial Middle School project was being compromised — from a student's point of view — by high overhead and over-design and the result was going to be insufficient space and a lack of student-centered amenities. The Daily Sun does not necessarily agree with that point of view but we do respect it. The parents asked that their identities be kept confidential and we are honoring that request.)