Decade-long project to create new Waterford High School nearly done

Symbolic completion comes well after the fact

Waterford — With one quick vote, the Waterford High School building project was out of the school board’s hands.

“I thought this day would never come,” Board of Education chairwoman Jody Nazarchyk said at a meeting late last month, just before the board’s members voted on a motion to officially close the project to rebuild Waterford High School.

The vote was not a significant one — the high school opened more than three years ago, and the town’s finance department will still have to complete an auditing process with state officials that could take more than a year.

But it was the symbolic end of a process that began more than a decade ago, took millions of dollars of town and state spending, and was likely undertaken just before state funding for huge school building projects could become scarce.

“We were very lucky,” Nazarchyk said Monday of the project that was approved when Randall Collins was

still Waterford’s superintendent. “Randy picked the perfect time.”

As early as 2004, town officials were trying to plan for a new or renovated high school and an consolidation of the town’s then five elementary schools. In 2009, when they finally approved a plan to rebuild the high school, the one-story building was more than 50 years old and, Nazarchyk said, in such bad condition that its air quality was causing health problems for students.

The Board of Finance and Representative Town Meeting in 2009 approved a plan to finance the $67 million with short-term borrowing and bonding, and the state Office of School Construction Grants and Review pledged to reimburse the town for 33.57 percent of the construction costs.

Now Waterford’s high school students walk the halls of a state-of-the-art school outfitted with an enormous auditorium, a mezzanine-level skywalk and athletic facilities that host a different competition seemingly every weekend.

Former school building committee Chairman Alan Wilensky and Jay Miner, the district’s buildings and grounds director, oversaw much of the project and helped develop a school that Nazarchyk said the town should be proud of.

With the school board’s February vote to close the project, Finance Director Maryanna Stevens will start to work with a state Department of Administrative Services auditor to review the project and get the final portion of the state’s reimbursement to the town. The project came in under budget by about $500,000, Nazarchyk said.

But as state funding for school building construction costs shrinks, town officials agree that if Waterford had waited much longer, it would have had no chance of getting the reimbursement deal it did.

“It would not have happened,” Stevens said. “Or, we would have had to pay 100 percent of the costs.”

In January, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy announced he would scale back spending on local school construction projects in his proposed 2018 state budget because state bonding was on track to exceed the limit by $316 million in the 2018 fiscal year, the Connecticut Mirror reported.

Malloy proposed a bonding limit that would limit funding to municipalities to build or renovate schools, after legislators last spring canceled or delayed $1 billion in various school projects and programs.

And on Friday, the Hartford Courant reported that a plan for a $108 million state-funded high school in Bloomfield would be canceled and another school in Hartford would close and students there would be shuttled to another district next year due to concerns about the future of state funding.

A multi-million-dollar high school, let alone three new elementary schools, would probably not get past the gate in the current fiscal climate, according to Nazarchyk.

“The town couldn’t have picked a better time to start and finish it,” Nazarchyk said. “We’re so lucky that everyone in town worked together to do this.”