Schools Question: Priorities or Readiness?

Ari L. NoonanNewsLeave a Comment

Robert Frost Auditorium. Photo: Architectural Resources Group

Second in a series. 

Re: “Levin Tracks the School Bond Projects” 

Echoing the beliefs of colleagues and others, Steve Levin says his fellow School Board members concur on the opening priority list of how last year’s $106 million school improvements bond should be spent.

“The Community Budget Advisory Committee, with the help of Mike Reynolds (assistant superintendent for business), put out a list of Here Are Things We Think You Should Consider,” Mr. Levin said. “The list pretty much covered what the Board, collectively, had agreed on.

“Everybody agrees health-and-safety should come first.

“The hard part is going to be that our priorities, what we want to do, won’t drive everything because, for example, the Sports Complex.

“We have made a lot more progress on the Sports Complex, not necessarily because it is the highest priority but because it is ready to go.”

Mr. Levin cited a second illustration.

“The Robert Frost Auditorium is a project everybody agrees for one time needs to be done,” he said. “We have to plan for it. But it probably is going to be driven by when we can get it all approved by the Division of the State Architect.

“Small aspects are health-and-safety. But you wouldn’t necessarily say, ‘We are doing this first because it is health-and-safety.’ It’s mostly not. It’s just we are going to wind up doing that sooner rather than later because it’s closer to ready.

“And of course it’s closer to ready,” said Mr. Levin, “because people have known for a long time that we needed to do that. Work was started long before we had a bond program.”

(To be continued)

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