November 12, 2023 | By Lisa Scagliotti

*Built in the mid-1960s, Harwood Union Middle/High School was last renovated in the late 1990s. File photo by Lisa Scagliotti*

A new renovation bond for Harwood Union Middle/High School is on the horizon for 2024 and school district officials this week will launch a series of meetings to gauge public opinion before they decide exactly what to include in the project plans.

Starting at 6 p.m. at Harwood this Thursday, Nov. 16, school administrators, project designers and school board members will begin a series of seven public meetings to discuss details for updating the district’s largest school.

This week’s meeting will be held in the Harwood auditorium. After that, the next six meetings will be spread around the Harwood Unified Union School District with one in each of its communities, ending in mid-January.

The public meeting schedule is:

Nov. 16: 6 p.m. Harwood Union High School auditorium
Nov. 28: 6 p.m. Brookside Primary School gym
Dec. 5: 6 p.m. Warren Elementary School gym
Dec. 14: 6 p.m. Crossett Brook Middle School cafeteria
Dec. 19: 6 p.m. Moretown Elementary School cafeteria
Jan. 11: 6 p.m. Waitsfield Elementary School gym
Jan. 16: 6 p.m. Fayston Elementary School gym

In a letter posted on the district’s social media, sent to families with children currently in school, and in a flier to be mailed to community members, the HUUSD School Board invites the public to attend one of the meetings. (The letter also is posted in the “From the HUUSD” column on Waterbury Roundabout’s Education page.)

“This is a major undertaking that will have an impact on school district programs and finances for years to come, so your input is crucial,” the school board’s letter states.

*A 1965 announcement of the bond vote to build Harwood Union High School. Source: Harwood History at Harwood.org*

Built in 1965-66, Harwood Union High School opened in September 1966. Today, many of the building’s systems and features are original. The presentation for the upcoming series of meetings contains slides with historical information including one with the announcement of the February 11, 1965 vote on the $1.6 million bond to build the school.

“While it is aged, it was progressive for its time,” Superintendent Mike Leichliter said of the building. “We want to acknowledge that this has been a building that has served the community well, and it’s also a building that at the time really connected all of our communities.”

Moving past the 2021 vote

This is the second push for updating the 57-year-old high school that the district has made in the past several years. In November 2021, the district held a special vote on a $59.5 million bond that voters overwhelmingly turned down 2,599 to 975.

That proposal called for spending $53.5 million to renovate Harwood and $6 million to expand Crossett Brook Middle School. At the time, the school board and administration were looking to consolidate all of the district’s seventh- and eighth-grade classes at Crossett Brook.

The district has not made any changes to middle school configuration since the voters rejected the plan. Harwood still currently has students in grades 7 and 8 – mostly coming from Moretown, Fayston, Waitsfield and Warren. Crossett Brook serves students in grades 5-8 mainly from Waterbury and Duxbury. However, because the district allows families to choose schools, each school has some students enrolled from the communities not in its primary area.

Following the bond defeat, the question of renovating Harwood was put on hold in 2022 as the school board and administration navigated multiple transitions. School board membership and leadership saw turnover that year and Leichliter was hired to succeed Brigid Nease as the district’s top administrator.

Soon after he joined the district in mid-2022, Leichliter put out a survey to the community. He said he heard concerns from the public about the need to upgrade Harwood despite the lack of support for the 2021 bond. The school board asked Leichliter to draw up a timeline and process to get the renovation plans back on track.

One key step came last May when the school board voted unanimously to abandon the plan to consolidate the middle schools. The new board largely viewed the plan as lacking public support and a key factor in the school construction bond’s failure. Leichliter asked the board for direction and the board agreed that Harwood should remain a grade 7-12 school.

In August, a small committee began meeting to map out a schedule and process to put together a new renovation project that would require a vote on a new bond. District leaders also decided to continue working with the Burlington architectural firm TruexCullins that has been involved in looking at upgrades to the Harwood facility for the past 7 or 8 years.

Renovation bond 2.0

The committee began by revisiting the 2021 to-do list, minus the Crossett Brook construction.

“A lot of those needs are similar” now, Leichliter said.

Facilities Manager Ray Daigle agreed, but noted at the Nov. 8 school board meeting that some key changes since the 2021 renovation bond involve standards for heating, ventilation and air handling that have arisen during the COVID-19 pandemic. The changes will mean more extensive upgrades to ductwork, for example, than what was envisioned in 2021, he said.

School officials are putting the finishing touches on a slide presentation for the upcoming public meetings that will outline the various building needs broken down into several categories.

The top priority items fall under the “Compliance & Repairs” category and include roof replacement, new plumbing, electrical and heating-ventilation systems, handicap accessibility improvements and bringing science labs up to modern code standards. The long list includes replacing windows, doors, security systems, and lighting. Outside work includes repairs and paving to the parking lot, stormwater management work, a new surface and fencing for the running track.

Addressing hazardous materials such as asbestos flooring and potential PCB contamination also falls into that category.

Harwood was constructed in the same era as Burlington High School where the discovery of PCB contamination from a variety of building materials resulted in the closure of that facility in 2020. Students in Vermont’s largest city now attend high school in the former Macy’s department store building on Church Street. The state has since addressed the need to test school facilities for the presence of the now-banned cancer-causing chemicals in buildings constructed or renovated before PCBs were discontinued from use.

All of the HUUSD schools except for Crossett Brook which is the newest facility built in the late 1990s are scheduled to be tested. Harwood Union Middle/High School was to be done in 2025, but Leichliter said last week that he had received word that the state would move up testing at Harwood to spring 2024. The timing will allow for the results to be considered in the renovation plans, he said.

Other areas of work the next bond would cover include efficiency measures such as upgrading building insulation, site work to improve traffic flow on the campus, and relocating the Harwood Community Learning Center from an off-site building on Dowsville Road to the main school facility.

A third category contains a long list of potential improvements to address modern educational programming needs such as adding a student wellness center, a community kitchen, subject-area learning hubs including a STEM area; new furniture, and expanded areas for the athletic trainer, athlete changing rooms and art gallery space.

Considering the options

A key part of the public meetings will be to hear opinions on a separate list of potential options to include in the bond package such as constructing a second gymnasium and fitness center, upgrading the auditorium’s seating, sound, lighting and rigging systems, achieving a net-zero energy status, wholescale window replacement and additions, constructing a track and field building, and relocating the district’s central offices from rented space in Waitsfield to the district’s Dowsville Road building.

So far, school officials have not shared updated cost estimates for any of the proposed or potential work, although Leichliter told the school board last week that project estimators are getting close.

“We did just receive some preliminary construction cost numbers,” he told the board on Nov. 8. TruexCullins staff are reviewing them, Leichliter said. “We want to make sure they are accurate. We know once we put numbers out publicly that people are going to really remember those numbers.”

Administrators, board members and designers all expect that cost estimates have likely increased in the past three years given the pandemic, and supply chain and workforce issues in the marketplace. Discussions to date acknowledge that those factors combined with some new standards as Daigle described will likely put costs in the ballpark of the previous bond.

Bond Committee Chair Ashley Woods said the figures will help inform the choices that lie ahead. “We are coming up against the ‘have-tos’ versus ‘wants,’” she said.

At the public meetings, the slide presentation will include details on the 2024 schedule for finalizing the construction plans and the bond along with potential tax implications for various construction scenarios, school officials explained.

“We will see what people will support and not support,” Leichliter said. And based on that feedback, architects will receive their direction. “We want to get as many people involved as possible.”

The school district will mail a flier to community members with the invitation to attend one of the upcoming public meetings. That mailer will contain a QR code to scan for an online survey asking for public opinion – an alternative to weighing in at a meeting. School officials said they are working with Mad River Valley TV to have the meetings recorded and available online afterward for people to watch.

Following the public meetings, school officials will review all of the feedback to give project designers direction on which elements to include in the revised cost estimates. Next spring, the school board will refine the list to finalize the scope of work to be covered by the bond. The schedule anticipates putting the package out to the voters in time for the November 2024 general election. If voters pass the measure this time, work could begin in 2025.