Mineola School District facilities have seen a substantial improvement over the last five years, but there is still much work to be done, Superintendent of Schools Michael Nagler said Thursday.
The school board was presented with the findings of the 2015 Building Condition Survey during their regular meeting at the Willis Avenue School.
Michael Mark, a principal architect of Hicksville-based firm Mark Design Studios who helped develop the survey, gave each of the district’s seven school buildings, bus garage and buildings and grounds facility a grade of “satisfactory.”
“The difference between the last BCS and this one is night and day,” Nagler said. “The work we’ve done really over the last five or 10 years has covered all of the major projects. Everything else [except replacing boilers] we’ve chipped away over time.”
The state Education Department requires school districts to submit a Building Condition Survey every five years.
A Building Condition Survey is a visual inspection of all occupied school buildings conducted by a district-selected team of at least one architect or engineer. The survey assesses current conditions of all program spaces, major buildings and site systems and components.
The intent of the survey is to assess those items for evidence of deterioration and structural failure, and prioritize repairs/replacement projects. Systems and buildings are graded on a scale from “excellent” to “critical failure.”
Mark said a rating of “excellent” is typically reserved for buildings that are built sometime within the last five years.
The newest building in the Mineola School District, the Willis Avenue School, was constructed 13 years ago in 2003, meaning a “satisfactory” rating is realistically the highest grade Mineola can earn.
Even the district’s oldest building, Mineola Middle School, constructed in 1927, received a satisfactory rating, needing only minor repairs and upgrades.
“The last BCS wasn’t so good,” Nagler said. “We didn’t have satisfactory on a lot of the buildings.”
The superintendent said he was not surprised by the results of this year’s Building Condition Survey, and thanked Daniel Romano, director of school facilities and operations, for his work in keeping the district’s facilities up to par.
“Not everyone knows he’s around,” Nagler said. “Until something breaks, then everybody knows his name.”
Once a five-year improvement plan is approved by the Board of Education, Mark will submit the results of the 2015 Building Condition Survey to the state Education Department through their online portal. Results are due on June 30, 2016.
The completed findings include photographs and three-dimensional models of all the district’s facilities along with two-dimensional floor plans that are “marked up” to illustrate areas needing improvements.
Findings also include checklists for improvement projects organized by priority and budget estimates for all projects and materials.
Funding for facilities improvements are outlined in a five-year capital improvement plan to be released by the district at the next school board meeting, Feb. 11 at 7 p.m. at the Willis Avenue School.
Items on that five-year plan are then folded into the district’s regular budget on a year-by-year basis. Nagler called the forthcoming capital improvement plan “aggressive.”
The most common recommendations for improvement projects as outlined in this year’s Building Condition Survey were replacing exterior doors and glass panels, conducting roof moisture scans, updating bathroom facilities to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, updating playgrounds with better safety equipment and repairing asphalt parking lots and concrete walkways which have deteriorated over the years.
“Anyone that’s driven through the high school parking lot after a good rain knows that needs to get done,” Nagler said. “That’s a big expensive job that is not exciting…but it still has to get done.”
At the district’s bus garage, Mark recommended the school board replace the skylights and several windows on the south side of the building that have been damaged by the impact of line-drives. The garage is directly adjacent to the high school’s baseball field.
“Part of that is due to you have a phenomenal baseball team who can reach these with a home run,” Mark said. “Maybe we’ll put guards on the skylights when we replace them.”
The 2015 Building Condition Survey also recommends the board look into replacing some of the lockers at Mineola High School, while removing some of the older unnecessary lockers. Lockers are a costly item, Mark said, and having extra lockers can be an unnecessary expense.
“I remember the last Building Condition Survey and this is a very good improvement,” school board President Christine Napolitano said. “It’s like owning a house. Eventually things break down and needs repairs.”
“Obviously there is work to be done,” she added. “But there will always be work to be done.”
