by Tom Stabile

Teachers don't have it easy leading 30 tireless 6-year-olds, all eager to speak, buzz around and sharpen their pencils at the same.

Building a new school right next door without disturbing that wonderful chaos is a tough job, too.

Just ask Gary Jones, manager of business development for Turner Construction Co.'s Educational Facilities Division.

"It's probably one of the toughest markets to work in based on the number of variables - the number of people to deal with, the tight school-day and academic-year schedule, even the weather," Jones said. "Sometimes way upstate, snow is still melting in July."
That hasn't deterred Turner from taking on $2.5 billion of K-12 construction management work over the last five years in upstate New York. Right now, Turner is managing for 15 school districts from the Hudson Valley to Buffalo, overseen by Carl Stewart, Turner's operations manager based in Albany. Each assignment involves multiple projects, including three new facilities and dozens of renovations and additions.

Playing Catch-Up

The current slate is the back end of a school construction boom in New York, sparked by a 5-year-old program providing extra state capital funds to local districts, Stewart said. For Turner, the work ranges from bathroom rehabs to the $37 million renovation of Proctor High School in Utica, complete with a 3,000-seat, synthetic-grass football stadium.

It also involves coordination with scores of school-savvy contractors like The Thomas Group in Ithaca, whose architectural and engineering division is working with Turner on new projects in the Queensbury Union and Pine Bush school districts. Upstate districts formed a pent-up market, said Bari Lee, executive vice president for Thomas, which has nine offices statewide.

"A lot of districts hadn't done anything to a school building that was 20 or 30 or 40 years old," Lee added. "Many needed additional space and had to take care of aging buildings."

Such renovations - and tight spaces - create construction challenges.

"There's no place to put kids, so you have to get creative in how you renovate while school is in session," Stewart said. "We have to deal with dust, noise, fall hazards, asbestos, ADA issues and separating the construction from the students."

An example is a major high school renovation for the East Syracuse-Minoa schools, on which Chris Gray is Turner's project manager. The project is nearly doubling the size of a 75,000-sq.-ft. single-story building and adding six wings for a gymnasium, cafeteria and classrooms.

The building has remained occupied throughout construction, often requiring the relocation of faculty and staff. Gray called the work "a ballet, if you will, of moving people in order to finish different additions at different times, so that we can renovate about 80 percent of the existing structure."

Currently, Turner has three jobs in planning stages, a pace down from 10 not long ago. Jones said the state's uncertain fiscal picture has put many plans for new school construction on hold.

CM Comes of Age

Turner has helped establish construction management in school construction upstate, which for years was dominated by the clerk-of-the-works process, with an architect or other primary coordinator providing oversight. Jones said over time, schools districts have begun to realize how a CM can bring in projects on time, on budget and with high quality.

"With a clerk-of-the-works, you really don't get preconstruction - the construction manager reviewing constructability of the designs," Jones added.
Joe Nadeau, Turner project manager at the Schalmont schools near Schenectady, cited value engineering and estimating. "We sell ourselves [by] saying we'll save our fee," he said.

Still, cracking the market isn't easy because many decision-makers are involved, including elected school board members, administrators and ultimately voters who approve referendums for school funding.

"You are probably more in the eye of the community than any project with big business," Jones said. "Since the construction of a school can take two or three years, maybe four, the group that hired you might not be there when you finish. There's a high level of mobility in the ranks of superintendents, business officials, buildings-and-grounds guys. That's challenging, working with different people all of the time."
Additionally, the CM provides detailed progress reports and budgets at public meetings.

"You're very answerable in a democratic way," Jones added.

He said that ideally, the CM comes in at the outset to ensure that the package put before voters is fiscally realistic.

Robert Lopez, a principal with Einhorn Yaffee Prescott Architecture & Engineering in Albany, said he prefers working with a CM early on for estimating and constructability reviews, as his firm has done with Turner for the Onteora school district. "The better projects are when the CM is on board right away," Lopez said.

But the CM's key work comes in coordinating the project team, which under the Wick's Law must include separate prime contractors for electrical, HVAC, plumbing and general construction.

Dean Marotta, vice president in charge of construction for general contractor Bast-Hatfield, which works frequently with Turner, said having a good CM is critical because contractors cannot control the pace of their partners.

"[CMs] try to do the schedule as best they can, and they're in constant contact with all of the contractors," Marotta added.

Delicate Balance

K-12 construction guarantees several layers of complexity. Scott Bridie, a unit manager overseeing Turner projects in the Hudson Valley region, said a single addition pulls in everything from OSHA regulations to state safety guidelines.

That starts with all workers passing background checks and abiding by rules prohibiting smoking or interaction with students. But it also involves site issues like keeping construction dust and fumes out of the school.

"I have to create a work barrier," Bridie said. "The air has to be channeled outside of the school using negative air machines and HEPA filters."

A constant hurdle is tight spacing, Bridie added. Sometimes, when there is no swing space, contractors work the second and third shifts.

Scheduling is a major concern, especially with districts wanting quick access to their schools but trying to collapse most work into summer. Turner's Nadeau said that means a constant cycle of seeking state education department approval of design plans in order to take advantage of the summer break. "To put out plans for five different buildings gets pretty difficult," he said.

Marty Griffin, project manager for Turner's work in Utica, is preplanning for a tight summer slate of six elementary schools and a high school. "We try to get it out to bid and get it let as soon as possible, so that products can be ordered and materials delivered," he said. "For instance, since they're on (spring) vacation this week, in four schools we're going to start on heavy demolition on some of the toilet rooms."

Gray faced a similar schedule for East Syracuse Elementary School in East Syracuse. "They try to get us to crunch four months of work into two months," he said. "Don't plan on taking your vacations until after September."

Turner's jobs have a little of everything. At the East Syracuse school, it tore down an existing three-story structure but kept the gymnasium, then rebuilt two stories on the old footprint. Gray said the $8.5 million job wrapped up with the school opening its doors on time in December.

The new 53,000 sq. ft. of space include 24 classrooms. "One of the challenges was maintaining electric and providing supplemental heat for the gym, which had wood flooring, because we had removed the old boiler room," Gray said.

Another project involved the unique structural and steel configurations of a new pool for the Minisink Valley school district. Lee said Turner helped coordinate the effort using The Thomas Group's advanced design software.

"That was a very unusual construction - the structural components," Lee said. "We did a lot of 3D-modeling to explain to the contractors how the steel was going to go together."

A main ingredient of many New York projects is technological upgrading. The Myers Group, based in Vestal, N.Y., is working on Schalmont and other school projects with Turner as a technology consultant, said President Dan Myers.

"Turner as a CM has recognized that there's a need for technology specialists to handle anything from technology wiring to audio-visual systems, telephone systems and security systems," Myers added. "For instance, a science lab - where can we put our access points here? Maybe this is a good candidate for a wireless."

Myers also helps districts maximize funding for the upgrades using other pots of money, such as a federal program pooling FCC telephone surcharges and the BOCES program.

Another major focus is getting buildings into compliance with the federal Americans With Disabilities Act, which took up a big chunk of a $26 million, five-school assignment for the Tonawanda City School District that Turner completed last September. At each of the five schools, built between the 1920s and 1950s with many interim additions, Turner was upgrading access points into the buildings, adding or enlarging doorways, installing elevators, building ramps, and taking on many other ADA-related improvements.

Matt Sikora, Turner's superintendent on the project outside Buffalo, said building age was a major factor, since the architect was unable to locate original design drawings.
"We had somewhere around 490 changes from the original design due to opening the walls up and finding out, well that's not the way it is," Sikora said. "It wasn't the architect's fault. It was a lot of design-build on the spot."

The 13-month job, which included massive asbestos abatement, resulted in state-of-the-art renovations to the Tonawanda schools, including a high school that was 80 percent gutted and rebuilt with new cafeterias, science rooms, a gymnasium, a technology room and other features.

Past the Horizon

Work may be winding down on New York's boom, but New Jersey will likely fill the gap, with over $8 billion in new school capital funding being supervised by the recently created New Jersey Schools Construction Corp.

Turner hopes to have a hand in it, said Jones, who often staffs the firm's booth at gatherings for the American Association of School Administrators and the National School Boards Association.

But he also sees New York as a promising market for Turner once the current budget situation shakes out.

"Working around schools is so unique, but we have huge experience," Jones said. N

What Schools Turner Is Building Upstate

Turner is presently CM on many projects for 15 upstate New York school districts. The menu includes:

• Canajoharie Central School District in Canajoharie, $20 million.
  - 130,000-sq.-ft. addition to a high school that that lost its back portion
  to make way for construction of the N.Y. State Thruway in the 1950s.
  
• Cobleskill-Richmondville Central School District in Cobleskill, $26.5 million.
  
• East Irondequoit Central School District near Rochester, $25 million.
  
• East Syracuse-Minoa Central School District in East Syracuse, $32 million.
  - Major and minor renovations to six schools.
  
• Fairport Central School District in Fairport, $28 million.
  
• Madison-Oneida BOCES in Verona, $30 million.
  
• Marcus Whitman Central School District in Marcellus, $23.5 million.
  
• Onteora Central School District in Boiceville, $7 million.
  
• Oxford Academy & Central School District in Oxford, $20 million.
  
• Queensbury Union Free School District in Queensbury, $34 million.
  
• Schalmont Central School District near Schenectady, $32 million.
  
• Solvay Union Free School District in Solvay, $38.3 million.
  
• Spencer-Van Etten Central School District in Van Etten, $18.5 million.
  
• Sullivan West School District in Jeffersonville, $30 million.
  - A new high school set to open this fall.
  
• Utica City Schools in Utica, $42 million.
  - 12 schools, including a renovation and addition to Proctor High School.