When we last looked in on the BOE and the amazing out of control constructions costs, there was rumbling in the BOE that $6 million wasn’t just going to be transferred, without explantion or detail, as per Opdahl’s request, and that the planning commission wasn’t buying the cpatial requests put forward. The latter is a good thing, since the BOE was split on the cpaital request budget. So, we get this report from The Hour:

The commission wants a new plan for school construction because the current plan is nearing completion, said Torgny Astrom, chair of the planning commission in a letter dated Feb. 29. The current plan was developed in 2002 as a $200 million school renovation project and was to continue for five years.
“The five-year plan was for maintenance, renovation and facilities (in schools),” said Mark Gorian, director of school facilities. “It’s been recently updated and some of it coincides with the discussion about (reallocation of money for school construction).”

School construction is requesting the Board of Education reallocate $6 million to finish construction projects at Norwalk High school and four middle schools. When the request was first made, the BOE finance committee asked to see an updated construction plan which was presented to members on Feb. 27.

The preliminary draft will undergo several more changes before it’s presented again to the BOE, Gorian said. He said he hopes to have a complete plan within one to two months. Until then, school facilities can’t request any more funding for renovation projects from the city.

“It’s in the works,” said Gorian, when asked what stage the construction plan is in currently. “We’d like to get to the state before Jul. 1 so we can complete the paperwork with them.”

Superintendent of School Salvatore J. Corda said school facilities will work with the city in developing the newly updated plan.

“We’ve started working on the plan,” Corda said. “The question is how does it all (the rejected upgrades) fit. We don’t know yet.”

Okay, a start for sure. But let’s identify the big elephant in the room. Opdahl has proven, through multi million costs over runs that he is part of the problem here. This problem, of cost over runs, unaccounted for construction costs etc. was predicted by Price Waterhouse in their 2001 report that talked about the lack of experience in construction project management, from a financial perspective, that the Norwalk Public School system suffers from.

And, I do mean suffers. Oh it’s not just the tax payer who suffers because of increasing property tax increases. Sure, much of the comments here display the usual outrage over taxes, and understandably. No the real suffering is the children within the schools. Because every wasted dollar is one that is not going into the classroom. It’s instead going into the pockets of someone else, on a wasted, bloated, irrelevant construction item that slipped through the cracks or was blatantly tacked on because of poor decision making.

How much  more sacrifice do the children in the Norwalk schools have to endure before some real adults step up and demand that Opdahl be fired?

source: The Hour,  Funding halted until new plan updated, accepted, by Nina Sen, March 18, 2008