Burrell School District officials are moving forward with a roughly $8 million heating and cooling project for Burrell High School but will go back to the drawing board for a similar project at Bon Air Elementary.
The contract for the HVAC improvements at Burrell High School, awarded Tuesday by the school board, includes a $513,000 general construction contract to Arcon Contracting; a $6.3 million HVAC construction contract to Renick Brothers Mechanical Contractors; and a $1.1 million electrical construction contract to Sargent Electrical Co.
All told, those figures were about $800,000 more than what officials were anticipating, said Business Manager Jennifer Callahan.
Construction would start next week and be complete by next August, Callahan said.
The high school does not have air conditioning. Its heating and ventilation system is from 1964.
The school board has taken out a $10 million bond for the project and anticipates taking out another $10 million to cover the other proposed projects.
School directors rejected bids for HVAC and a kitchen addition at Bon Air, at Superintendent Shannon Wagner’s recommendation.
The lowest bid for that project came in at $12.6 million, which was about $3.8 million over budget.
The district will rebid a smaller scope of the Bon Air project, Callahan said. A timeline hasn’t been set for those projects, she said.
Like the high school, Bon Air doesn’t have air conditioning and its heating and ventilation systems are from 1997.
The projects come after the district closed Stewart Elementary and reconfigured grade structures to make Bon Air a kindergarten-through-fourth-grade building and Charles A. Huston Middle School a fifth-through-eighth-grade building. Burrell High School still serves students in ninth through 12th grades.
The board approved a $35,000 proposal from Allegheny Global Environmental for an asbestos inspection of Stewart. School officials have said their goal is to sell the property to a buyer who ultimately would increase Lower Burrell’s tax base.
Wagner declined Tuesday to further discuss an update on the property’s future.
