K-12 Projects - A Closer Look at Efforts in Miami-Dade, Palm Beach and Orange Counties

By Scott Judy

Miami-Dade's Ronald W. Reagan/Doral Senior High School

Miami-Dade County Public Schools is calling one of its newest senior high school projects a "huge success story" for the public-private partnership involved and the commitment to timely completion that it represented.

The school district's new $32 million Ronald W. Reagan/Doral Senior High School is scheduled for staff occupancy this month and is set to open for a new group of students arriving in August.

Betancourt Castellon Associates of Miami was the design-build contractor; Silva Architects of Miami was BCA's design partner. Spillis Candela DMJM of Miami provided the initial design for proposals.

Victor Alonso, construction officer for Miami-Dade County Public Schools, said the project drew considerable benefits from the public-private partnership. Century Homebuilders sold the 25-acre site to the school district at a reduced price, with one condition: the school not exceed - at any time - a total of 2,000 student stations.

Alonso said most high schools in Miami have capacities of about 2,800 student stations. Century thought a reduced-size school would be the most attractive option for the residential community it was developing.

The site posed a problem from the beginning. Muck was a major issue, and clearing and sitework took much longer than initially expected. Clearing work - handled by the developer - began in November 2003, but the site wasn't fully cleared and excavated until the following August.

As a result, in November 2004 - just three months after the sitework concluded - the district executed a change order to the general contractor to provide for the delay.

"We paid an extra amount to the contractor to accelerate the project," Alonso said.

"We saw that we were probably three or four months behind, and there was a possibility we may not get it done."

That would not be acceptable, he added. When the project had first come before the school board in 2003, the district had made a commitment to have the new Doral school open in time for the 2006-07 school year.

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"And we've met that commitment," Alonso said. "That is extremely important. It goes toward the credibility of the school board, and our reputation that when we commit to doing something, we accomplish it.

"There is a tremendous demand by communities to bring on these projects and reduce the overcrowding of schools and to build them quickly. People are not that patient.

They're demanding it. So we have to move quickly."

Palm Beach Co.'s Bak Middle School

Centex Construction of Plantation, Fla., has built dozens if not hundreds of schools throughout Florida over the years. Company senior vice president Clinton Glass said the mostly complete Bak Middle School for the Arts in West Palm Beach stands out as one of the most unique.

The new $34 million school, which is a magnet school for the arts, features state-of-the-art amenities, including a 650-seat auditorium and black-box theater with reception and prefunction space, dance studios with sprung-wood flooring, soundproof music rooms and classrooms that function as acting labs.

"It's not your typical middle school," Glass said. "There are a lot of specialty systems to serve those students. It required a lot of attention to a lot of detail, with respect to their talent in the arts, and giving them the best infrastructure to practice and improve their talent.

"It was unique. There's not many of these magnet schools around, so if you do over 100 schools, like we have, probably one or two of them are of this caliber."

The project started out with a $29 million price tag, but grew to $34 million after Palm Beach voters approved a half-cent tax for schools. Just after that referendum passed, school officials added the auditorium to Centex's contract. The contractor got started on the auditorium in February 2005 - three months after the referendum passed and 10 months after the original start date of May 2004.

"There are a lot of specialty trades that go into making these spaces," Glass said. "All of the overhead theatrics for the staging, and lighting, the sound system - those are all specialty elements that are in that facility."

He added that the nature of the project impacted all of the subs - even, for example, the tilt-wall contractor that had to deal with some rather unusual shapes and inlays for the new school's artistic architecture.

"There's just so many unique elements," Glass said. "Everybody had to raise their game. They had to step up and challenge themselves to do something they hadn't done before. I'd say that would be true of every single trade that was involved with this project."

Centex completed the project in time for the students to move into the new facility at the beginning of 2006.

The project was built on the same site as the existing Bak school, which was a converted high school.

Overall, the new facility has five buildings: a gym/cafeteria; two-story classroom building; one containing the media center and music labs; administration/auditorium; and a free-standing chilled-water plant.

Orange County's Prototype Schools

Architectural firm Schenkel Shultz of Orlando is in a unique position when it comes to Orange County Public School's building program. The design firm is charged with providing all prototype designs for the county's elementary, middle and high schools.

With the county's accelerating school construction program, that's a lot of work.

Currently, six schools based on Schenkel Shultz's "urban elementary" design are under construction, with four nearing completion for the next academic year.

Schenkel Shultz has been fulfilling this role for Orange County for several years now.

However, the "prototype" designs that the firm first rolled out several years ago are evolving into more efficient and "green" structures.

The prototype design "has the ability to evolve over time," said Dan Tarczynski, partner and vice president of corporate design. "It's not designed to be one size fits all.

It's designed to have the framework of a structure and a building system that is flexible enough to adapt depending on the location and what's happening educationally within that region."

For example, whereas most school sites are about 14 to 15 acres, Schenkel Shultz recently had to adapt the design for the Catalina Elementary School that sits on a nine-acre location.

Flexibility is key.

"It utilizes approximately a 30-ft. planning module," Tarczynski said. "The interior load-bearing columns allow you to put walls where they're needed. It's a skeletal system that allows you to reorganize the inside depending on each location or depending on what happens educationally."

A school that has intense reading classes, for example, may require some additional smaller-scale rooms

The urban elementary prototype features a two-story classroom design, which makes the building more efficient and adds a psychological bonus, Tarczynski said.

"It's really nice that you can organize the school where the upper-level students - the fourth-graders, the fifth-graders - are upstairs, and they have that sense of going to the next level themselves," he added. "And it's nice that there is some separation between those two."

Overall, as a result of the trend toward green building over the last several years, the latest designs are more energy efficient and economical.

"When the prototype design was first done 10 years ago, the idea of creating a green building wasn't even considered," Tarczynski said. "It wasn't part of the atmosphere of architecture. There was just a little bit of green architecture, in terms of low-VOC products. Our next step was getting efficiencies in mechanical systems - that's really a big issue these days. Then we went to the lighting systems."

The two-story classrooms allow for maximum use of daylighting.

Also, the design has had to adjust over time for more-demanding construction schedules as well as substantially increased materials costs.

The first design was set up with a brick-and-block system, and now Schenkel Shultz is using concrete tilt-wall for speed and economy.

Tarczynski said most of the prototype schools, which average about 100,000 sq. ft. in size, are built within a 10.5- to 11-month timetable.