March 28, 2024

Berg Complex in endless series of repair, maintenance

District officials point toward remodeling, aging systems as cause

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Problems with the Newton Community School District’s Berg Complex can almost be summed up in one word: remodeling.

While there are many other factors in what has led the district to pursue a Sept. 13 general obligation bond to replace the building, the complex’s history of being expanded to accommodate more students has stretched the overall structure to its limits in efficiency and performance. Environmental, maintenance and overloaded utilities have left the district with two choices in order to both lower costs and resolve ongoing issues: move students into temporary classrooms and completely gut the facility, or simply replace it.

Over the past 20 years, since the last major remodeling was completed, spiraling maintenance costs in parts and labor have caused the district to seriously consider either a major remodel or rebuilding it.

Superintendent Bob Callaghan and maintenance supervisor Jack Suttek both say there are more maintenance efforts happening each year at the complex than all other district facilities combined.

While the oldest part of the structure, completed in 1963, does not make Berg technically the oldest in the Newton, it houses the most students and has been modified many times in ways that hinder and prevent major maintenance and upgrading. To maintenance staff and district finance personnel, Berg seems to have the needs of a much older structure.

Also, some of the hardware, systems and dimensions widely used in the Midwest in the 1960s turned out to involve ideas quickly abandoned a few short years later. Some of Berg’s circuit breakers are original, and have configurations neither Suttek nor most of his staff have seen anywhere else.

Repaired and modified many times — from the 1973 tornado damage to the roof and other aspects to the 1999 bond-approved additions that included new gymnasium and about 50 classrooms — Berg is hardly the ship that set sail from its original 1963 harbor. It is a high-maintenance vessel that must be either thoroughly remodeled or replaced in order to reduce its environmental and ongoing cost issues.

Callaghan said Berg is a safe building, but it is consuming a large fraction of the district’s financial and personnel resources to keep it that way.

“It’s a usable building,” Callaghan said. “But to provide major resolution to its biggest recurring issues, we need to either start with a new building, or go through some serious renovations — the kind that would disrupt education, and require students and staff to be relocated temporarily.”

An improvised grouping of electrical supply cables in a part of the complex’s boiler room is probably the most eye-catching part of Berg’s dilemma, but its inability to house new, efficiency-improving systems is only one element of the riddle.

The additions have added extra hallways and rooms to be heated or cooled, while the original HVAC system is now connected to a structure that services thousands more square feet than in its original mission — and the classrooms at the end of the long, tubular system gets the least benefit.

Classrooms in the newest addition have their own rooftop air conditioners, which run about $5,000 each, said Suttek. That’s a rising, ongoing expense to the district to maintain and/or replace 50 such units.

Some classrooms have no windows, while others are odd shapes or sizes. State law allows classrooms to be as large as 999 square feet before requiring a second exit (980 square feet is a commonly specified size), but Callaghan said many Berg classrooms are well below 980 square feet.

Mold has been found in Berg classrooms more than once in the past few years. This is unlikely to be prevented from recurring unless the district significantly modifies both the airflow and the “sealability” of the building.

Suttek said if cost were no object, he would fill in the underground vent system with concrete, remove the building’s flat roof and install with a pitched, raised replacement and install a new heating and cooling duct system above the ceilings.

Callaghan said the rule of thumb for school administrators is if the cost of remodeling or repairing a building is equal to half or more of the replacement cost, replacement is the recommended option.

Former NCSD board member Nat Clark said any Newton students who are “forced to get an education and work in that building are working in a 50-year-old piece-of-junk building that has not been maintained.”

Barbie Burnett has taught at nearly every NCSD facility in her 28 years with the district, including the past seven on what had been Berg’s K-3 elementary side. She said temperature differences from room to room are a huge distraction, along with noisy fans used to either offset unmanageable heat in the winter.

“A large, single-story building with many hallways makes it tough to keep track of students,” Burnett said. “Plus, some of Berg’s classrooms are very small and have no natural light.”

Here are a few of the major limitations of remodeling Berg:

• There is only about eight inches of space between the ceilings and the roof, should the district be willing to add massive wiring and ductwork. Unless all of the exterior walls were built higher and the roof replaced (possibly with the pitched roofs that cap Thomas Jefferson and Aurora Heights elementaries) or extremely low ceilings were utilized, this space will not change. There is not currently enough space above the ceilings to run modern ductwork.

• A more powerful or less-centralized HVAC system might help move air differently, but the tubular classroom configuration — especially in the newest wing of the grades 5-6 half of the complex — would remain the same.

• Upgrades of utilities would not, by themselves, help improve classroom sizes or allow windowless classrooms to have outdoor walls with windows.

• Students and staff would need to be housed in temporary classrooms while a remodel takes place over approximately a two-year period.

Contact Jason W. Brooks at 641-792-3121 ext. 6532 or jbrooks@newtondailynews.com