davidbau.com

Lincoln School Construction

I am volunteering on our town's School Building Committee.

The Lincoln K-8 school building is showing its age (with several of the old building systems at or beyond the point of failure), and last year Massachusetts selected Lincoln to be one of the towns to be eligible for state funding for school construction. The state subsidy could cover 40% of a renovation or building project. It is a terrific, once-in-a-generation opportunity to update our school.

It is my first time volunteering in town government, and honestly up to now the work on the committee has been mostly dry.

However, it is starting to get interesting: we are going through the process of evaluating nine architects who have applied to work on the project. Each firm would bring its own personality and set of capabilities to the project, and so we are going through the applications to understand which ones would be the best fit for the Lincoln schools. Because of state funding rules, the Lincoln SBC cannot select an architect on its own. We need to participate in a state architect selection committee on which Lincoln has 3 out of 15 votes. That is all the more reason for us to have a clear idea of who the architects are, and what we are looking for.

A few parents have asked me whether the project will be renovation or construction, or whether some particular thing will we built, and the answer is that it has not been decided yet. The architect's job will be to work with us draw up alternatives. So doing our homework and choosing the architect is a key step. If anybody in Lincoln is interested in finding out about the architects who have applied, I am happy to share. We have many strong applicants, and I am optimistic that we will be able to build a strong team to plan the project.

Posted by David at November 25, 2010 10:40 AM