2 schools’ revisions approved

Changes at Mills, Robinson OK’d

The School Board for the Pulaski County Special School District on Tuesday consented to some change orders and reconfigured construction plans for the new Robinson Middle and Mills High schools that are to open in August.

The change orders at Mills total $1 million and include the addition of a turning lane on Dixon Road, where the school is, as well as additional science lab sinks, a west parking lot, floor finishes and a landscape budget. At Robinson, the approved change orders to the building contract are primarily for parking lot changes, sidewalks and grading of land by the baseball field at a total cost of $110,000.

The reconfigurations to be made at both sites, which are separate from the change orders, are at least partly the result of district administrators, academic program directors and principals touring the construction sites and questioning the whereabouts of space for certain courses or required student services.

At Robinson, space for a Community Based Instruction program for students with developmental disabilities and a laboratory for family consumer science were left out of the original construction plans.

At Mills, the addition of a math classroom, changes in spaces for occupational and physical therapy, added offices for an athletic director and for security, and additional restrooms for physical education/athletic spaces in the building are among the features to

be added.

The changes and costs approved by the board Tuesday total about $300,000 at Robinson Middle and $440,000 at Mills.

Additionally, Baldwin & Shell Construction Co. leaders — who have been working with the architects for the different projects — are expected to go back to the board in February with costs for converting the old Fuller Middle School Annex into classroom and office space for the Mills Junior ROTC program.

Moving the ROTC program to the annex, which was originally set for demolition, will free up needed space in the main Mills building.

The building revisions — some of which require demolition of newly completed construction or revamping of utilities — come in the aftermath of school district leaders telling a federal judge late last year that the district had budgeted less than $40 million for the new 700-student Mills High.

That was short of the $56 million the district had told the judge that it would spend on a new Mills and the relocation of Fuller Middle schools to make them comparable to the district’s much newer schools — Maumelle High, Chenal Elementary and Sylvan Hills Middle — that are in parts of the district that are more affluent and serve higher percentages of white students.

The 12,000-student Pulaski County Special district is a party in a 35-year-old school desegregation lawsuit and, as such, remains under federal court supervision of its efforts to eliminate the building inequities.

District leaders have since offered assurances to U.S. District Judge D. Price Marshall Jr., the presiding judge in the case, that the district will spend at least $56 million on the Mills building and the relocation of the current Fuller Middle School to the current Mills building. The district also anticipates spending about $44 million on the new Robinson Middle School in west Little Rock.

In response to questions from board members about the omissions from the initial school designs, interim Superintendent Janice Warren said that a family consumer science laboratory — with its kitchen units — is not required by the state. But she said it should be a part of the new campus because it is a feature of the current Robinson Middle School and all other middle schools in the district.

As for the Community Based Instruction program, Warren said the district has only a temporary state waiver to transport the Robinson students in the program to one in Maumelle.