Bond, planning moving forward for Berg rebuild

The sale of $10 million in bonds at Monday’s Newton Community School District Board of Education meeting was one of the most visible recent developments in the preparation to rebuild Berg Middle School.

However, there have also been some developments that haven’t been as noticeable, though still important.

Monday, the NCSD board sold $10 million in general-obligation bonds to the lowest of 18 bidders — Citigroup Global Markets, Inc., of Denver, Colo., with the help of Des Moines firm PFM. Another $10 million will be sold in 2017, with the balance of the voter-approved $26.9 million bond to be sold in 2018.

Superintendent Bob Callaghan made a Nov. 22 presentation to the Newton Rotary Club about a number of school district finance issues, along with details about recent meetings of the Middle School Construction Committee, and also covered some of the committee’s progress at Monday’s meeting.

“Berg currently has about 30,000 square feet of instructional space,” Callaghan said regarding design plans. “The new building will have about 61,000.”

The middle school reconstruction is financed entirely through the bond levy and is not mixed in any way with other funds that affect salaries, department or campus budgets or even maintenance of the current middle school campus.

The Middle School Construction Committee is comprised of 12 teachers, four department supervisors, three community members, two students, an administrator and a school board member. There are also small “user groups” of two or three people that were set to meet this week to go over extremely specific design elements.

“The initial committee that met last winter was advising on a design to take the bond vote to the public,” Callaghan said. “These user groups focus a ‘micro’ equivalent. They’re talking about where to put wall sockets, desks, phones, projectors.”

FRK Design will take input from user groups to update a working schematic design to be presented to the committee next week. A 5 p.m. meeting Dec. 7 at the EJH Beard Administration Center will be where the entire committee advises FRK Design on more changes.

The design firm will then bring its final design to the NCSD board’s regular meeting Dec. 12 for approval. That will be followed by approval of an overall site plan— penciled in for January and February —followed by construction document approval in mid-March.

The timeline is structured to allow requests for bids to go out early next year and contracts to be awarded in the spring, with work to begin in the late spring or summer of 2017.

The $33.6 million project — which includes the $26.9 million bond approved in September — is scheduled to be completed in time to house students in fall of 2019. The new building will still utilize the newest, largest gymnasium of the current Berg Complex, but the rest of the older structure is set to be demolished once the new school is completed on the northeast part of the campus.

Priorities, as outlined by the committee, include natural light, open airy spaces, secure spaces for student, interactive technology-rich media hardware and software, an inviting and clear entry point to the building, a non-traditional facility that still feels like a school, flexible learning spaces and seating areas, collaborative learning communities with variety of flexible seating for group and individual learning and multi-functional gathering/performance common areas.

At Monday’s meeting, board member Ann Leonard asked if the new Berg classrooms will be about the same size as the current ones. Since Berg’s classrooms vary greatly, depending on whether the classrooms are part of the original building or one of the remodeled segments, a teacher might end going to a slightly smaller classroom, but one of the purposes of the rebuild is to avoid some of the small, 870-square foot classrooms seen in Berg today.

One standard size for classrooms is 980 square feet, as modern fire code guidelines typically call for a second exit beginning at 1,000 square feet. Regardless of how each teaching space is structured, there will be much more overall classroom square footage in the new multi-story building. Science classrooms will be about 1,200 square feet — 200 square feet larger than the current Berg rooms.

Callaghan said “instructional space” doesn’t include space such as the two gyms, performance stage or the four planned resource rooms. He said some areas will slightly compromise classroom square footage in favor of expanding specialty areas.

“For example, cooking classes, in exchange of increasing the number of kitchens from five to six,” Callaghan said. “So it’s not only more space, it’s better use of space as well.”

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