Miami’s Rejuvenated School-Building Program

After years of subdued construction activity, new schools are cropping up all over Miami-Dade County as the district battles to shrink class sizes.

By Debra Wood

Faced with crowded schools and a state mandate to decrease class sizes, Miami-Dade County Public Schools embarked a couple of years ago on a $3.5 billion, five-year capital improvement program to build capacity. Many of those projects are now under way.

“We’re in the midst of an ambitious building program,” says Victor Alonso, design officer with Miami-Dade County Public Schools. “We have had a tremendous amount of work awarded during the past two to three years, and we still have quite a bit of work to award during the next couple of years in order to reach the requirements imposed by the Class Size Reduction Amendment.”

For fiscal year 2006-2007, ending in June, the district expected to have awarded $600 million in construction contracts. In 2005-2006, it awarded $888 million. That compares to $168 million in 2003-2004 and $335 million in 2004-2005. Alonso says he anticipates that the district will let between $300 million and $500 million annually in the years ahead, depending on funding availability.

“They have had an extremely aggressive program the last few years in response to class-size reduction and growth in population,” says Mike Geary, executive vice president of James B. Pirtle Construction Co. of Davie, which holds multiple school contracts. However, Geary adds, “The program seems to be slowing down due to funding constraints.”

The work comes out of a comprehensive strategic planning process developed after new leaders took charge of Miami-Dade schools in 2004.

M-DCPS will open 10 schools this year and 13 in 2008. The five-year plan calls for 40 new schools, about 30 expansion projects and renovations at nearly every existing school. During the past two years, the district opened 19,000 student stations, with 20,000 to open this year and 25,000 in ‘08.

More than half of the new stations resulted from the district’s modular program. Miami-Dade schools found that it obtained a better product building tilt-up modular classrooms instead of adding prefabricated portables.

“It’s been very successful for us,” Alonso says. “In the first two years of the five-year plan, it’s what allowed us to build as many student stations as we built.”

Although still used, modular construction tapered off as the district’s plan for building prototype schools got under way. It hired four architectural firms and charged each of them with designing an adaptable prototype for one of the following: early childhood centers or K-2, elementary, middle and K-8 schools.

“This is a whole new generation of schools Miami-Dade schools decided to embark on,” says Jose Murguido, a partner with Zyscovich of Miami, one of the selected architectural firms. “It started with a research and development phase to find the most innovative lessons learned.”

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Prototypes

The district hired four construction firms to each build three schools that shared the same design, thinking that common specs could save money and speed production. It worked. Alonso says that recent bids on additional prototype schools are lower than the early ones. The learning curve decreases as contractors build more of the same design, he adds.

“We saw a repeat of the K-8 at a slightly lower price,” Alonso says. “The first three were approximately $35 million and one of the repeats came in under $34 million.”

Pirtle received a contract for three K-8 schools, in Aventura, south Miami-Dade County and Homestead. It since has picked up two more K-8s.

“The schools are a little bigger than an elementary school but not as big as a middle school,” Geary says. K-8 prototypes average 160,000 sq ft and are three stories tall.

The early child centers average 38,000 sq ft, and the elementary schools range in size from 93,000 sq ft to 123,000 sq ft. The middle schools average 165,000 sq ft each and have two three-story buildings.

Jasco Construction Co. of Miami began work on the early childhood centers; Suffolk Construction Co. of Sunny Isles Beach, Fla., the elementary schools; and James A. Cummings of Fort Lauderdale the middle schools.

“This is unique for them to go to prototype design,” says Eric Squilla, a vice president with Cummings. “In order to save time, we went to a guaranteed maximum price on 50 percent construction documents. That’s one challenging aspect. But so far, it’s been working well.”

As with other owners, M-DCPS has had to deal with rising material costs. Alonso says that costs have jumped 50 percent annually for the last three years.

“That has had a huge impact on our plan,” Alonso says. “We may not be able to accomplish all of the projects we hoped to when we started.”

K-8

More than eight years ago, M-DCPS began converting elementary schools to K-8 facilities. While data indicates mixed educational benefits, Alonso says parents prefer the smaller environment and do not want their children switching schools.

Large open parcels are becoming a scarcity in Miami-Dade County. Consequently, Zyscovich designed a modular prototype, with six pieces that can be modified to fit different sites.

“Of the five we are building, no two are alike,” Murguido says. “You could assemble these buildings next to each other in any order.”

The buildings also sport varying facades to match the community where they are located. Interior spaces include small project rooms for hands-on learning. There also are galleries in the hallways to display students’ achievements.

Pirtle started constructing the E1 project in North Miami in January on a city athletic field and expected to finish the K-8 in August 2008. At that time, a high school on the site will come down and the recreation area restored. The company recently began working on P1 in Doral, a $37 million K-8, on a small, wet site. Work includes removing 4-in. of muck throughout and dredging a lake for fill.

High Schools

In addition to the prototype schools, Miami-Dade is building several new high schools. Some will replace outdated facilities.

Pirtle will complete the $58 million Miami-Jackson replacement school in August. The phased project began in August 2005 and includes tearing down the old school to build parking and then demolishing the former parking lot and replacing it with athletic fields.

Pavarini Construction Co. of Miami received a design-build contract for the new South Dade Senior High in Homestead in November 2005 and began construction in January 2006 on the $80 million, 400,000-sq-ft school. Pavarini began foundation and underground work while Song + Associates of West Palm Beach finalized the design. The school’s multiple buildings are being built to serve as hurricane shelters, and that meant they needed structural upgrades.

“The walls and roof members have been beefed up to accommodate hurricane loads,” says Rene Perez, senior project manager for Pavarini. He says the school should be substantially complete by late October.

Once construction wraps up and the students move in, Pavarini will demolish the old school, finish the athletic facilities and covert an area to farm fields for use by the students in the agricultural program.

The Miami office of Suffolk Construction is working on a replacement for North Miami Senior High. The new $82 million, 350,000-sq-ft, two-story facility will accommodate 3,000 students. Using a phased construction plan, Suffolk will build four three-story, tilt-up classroom buildings before demolishing the existing high school. It will then complete the balance of the project. Timing of the job also depends on completion of a new middle school and demolition of the existing middle school.

Cummings also has a high school under way. It began work on the $87 million, 330,000-sq-ft JJJ campus in Hialeah Gardens in November 2006. Unlike the others, this is a relief school.

Looking ahead, M-DCPS plans to award contracts to replace the Miami Beach High School and add a new school in Kendall, at this point called YYY1, which it hopes will become the district’s first LEED-certified school.

Additionally, Pirtle expects to break ground later this year on the $32 million College of Policing, a project of the school district and the city of Miami. The four-story building, adjacent to the existing police headquarters, will house both a high school and the police department.

Useful Sources

Miami-Dade County Public Schools
2005-2008 District Strategic Plan
http://osp.dadeschools.net/districtstrategicplan/DistrictStrategicPlan_05-08.pdf