Board of education to decide on fate of administration building

The Board of Education will decide next week on one of three options for replacing the storm-damaged administration building.

The administration building, at 235 Lido Blvd., remains closed since Hurricane Sandy, when the facility was flooded and suffered extensive damage. The building was deemed uninhabitable, and for almost two full school years, the district’s administrative operations have been spread across a few schools buildings. The board is holding a special meeting next Tuesday, April 29, at 7:30 p.m. at the Middle School auditorium to vote on which option will be pursued.

As the deadline to make a decision approaches, the district’s architectural firm CSArch presented details at the April 8 board meeting of three possible plans for housing administrators: replace the building in the same location, build an extension in the back of the middle school or take space from a wing in Lindell Elementary School. Administrators said that they must be housed together to work more efficiently, but some parents said that they don’t want to see millions of dollars spent on administrators while students’ programs remained on the budget’s chopping block.

A new building in the existing location would provide an 8,500 square-foot space that would cost $5.7 million to construct. Like many rebuilt homes in the area, the building would need to be elevated above the flood plain, and helical piles — used to stabilize a foundation on unstable soil — would need to be installed to anchor the foundation. The building would have to be larger than the existing structure to accommodate building, safety and ADA codes.

The option to build an addition to the Lido Complex would provide not only administrative offices, CSArch representatives said, but also restore four of the six science classrooms that were damaged during Sandy, and subsequently condemned. The architects predicted possible issues with inadequate parking and timing conflicts between students’ sports practice and the end of the administrators’ workday, as they would overlap in the same space. The renovation of the 12,500 square-foot area — including the classrooms — would be $7.9 million.