School board update: Waitsfield kitchen overhaul on deck

October 31, 2022 | By Lisa Scagliotti

The Harwood Unified Union School District board last week heard a request to move ahead with a long-discussed overhaul of the kitchen at Waitsfield Elementary School that would rely on using more than $500,000 of the district’s Maintenance Reserve Fund. 

A look into the Waitsfield Elementary School kitchen (numeral label removed from floor) Photo by TruexCullins

The board heard from Director of Maintenance and Operations Ray Daigle, Finance and Operations Director Lisa Estler, and Waitsfield Elementary Principal Kaiya Korb who together went over the need, the costs, and steps involved. 

The aim is for the board to take up the matter at its Nov. 9 meeting to vote on authorizing design and engineering needed to seek bids on the project. 

“The Waitsfield kitchen is in effect an old residential kitchen and needs some significant work to be made into a commercial kitchen suitable for the schools,” Daigle told the board. 

Korb explained the situation: Breakfast and lunch meals for Waitsfield students are prepared in the kitchen at the much smaller Fayston Elementary School. Two food service staffers handle the entire operation preparing, transporting, serving, and cleaning up each day, she said. 

The meals are transported in a vehicle belonging to one of the staff. After lunch, dishes used at Waitsfield that need cleaning are then transported back to Fayston to be cleaned and returned to Waitsfield for the next day. 

This arrangement has been in place for years and before working with Fayston, Waitsfield’s school had a similar setup getting meals from Harwood, she noted. 

A combination of enrollment and student participation in the meals program in the past two years has strained the system considerably. “It’s inefficient in a variety of ways, mostly time,” Korb said. 

Enrollment this year at Fayston Elementary is 74 students; Waitsfield has 137, according to figures shared last week by the district.

The proposed project would renovate the Waitsfield kitchen so that it could handle production of meals for both schools – with a smaller quantity needing transportation to Fayston instead. That’s on the school district’s three-year facilities plan, with funding listed to be spent this fiscal year, Estler pointed out. 

The district’s Maintenance Reserve Fund currently has about $4.1 million. The kitchen project in February was estimated at just over $402,000. Because that was months ago and building costs this year have risen, Estler said the district asked architects to update their calculations. A recently revised estimate is just under $554,000. Estler in her report in the board’s meeting packet shared a preliminary floorplan and photos that accompanied the February estimate done by the Burlington architectural firm TruexCullins.  

Superintendent Mike Leichliter said he’s reviewed the history on the situation and administrative team members agree the kitchen renovation should be a priority. “We believe it’s necessary to move forward,” he said. 

Board members asked a number of questions in the more than 30 minutes they discussed the topic. 

“This whole thing just seems weird to me,” said board member Mike Bishop of Fayston, adding that he wasn’t against the project. Bishop and others questioned whether the decision to move this project ahead now was considered alongside other building needs in other schools that might be more pressing. Choosing one school to focus on might also have “political undertones,” Bishop said. 

Waitsfield representative Christine Sullivan, the board’s longest-serving member, pushed back on that suggestion. She said she recalled this project being discussed when her child who graduated high school last June first entered kindergarten. 

“This is the only school in the district that does not have a commercial kitchen,” she said. “It’s not out of the blue.” 

She agreed that some of the work needed at Harwood Union Middle/High School that last November’s failed $60 million bond would have addressed is overdue. “This is also way overdue. It would be incredibly frustrating and disappointing to hold it off any longer,” she said. 

Bishop said he was shocked to learn that the Waitsfield kitchen work was not in last year’s bond. That proposal focused on renovating Harwood Union Middle/High School and expanding Crossett Brook Middle School in anticipation of combining all seventh- and eighth-grade classes at Crossett. Without the building expansion, the middle school merger plans are now on hold.

Sullivan noted that other schools have had facility improvements, mentioning work at Moretown Elementary and a new boiler and siding at Fayston. Together smaller projects easily add up to a comparable expense, she pointed out. “It’s unfortunate it was deferred for so long because it probably would have been less expensive had it been done sooner,” she said of the Waitsfield kitchen. 

Duxbury member Life LeGeros asked about the process for deciding which projects are funded and whether the kitchen project has been in line to be done soon. “Because right now to me this is feeling like it’s kind of like an extraordinary urgent situation thing. And I’m just not understanding exactly why. Or is this just how it usually rolls?” he asked.

Sullivan explained the three-year planning cycle for the Maintenance Reserve Fund projects and that the kitchen project is in the plan for this fiscal year. The Maintenance Plan project list included in the school district’s annual report (p.48) shows $200,000 for the Waitsfield kitchen and $400,000 for roof work at that school this fiscal year.  

Estler explained that following the bond rejection, the school district asked TruexCullins to create concept designs for several specific projects: the Waitsfield kitchen, the

Harwood Middle School roof, the Harwood high school entry and administrative offices, and the Harwood high school science wing and clerestories.

The middle school roof was done this summer. Daigle said for various reasons all but the Waitsfield kitchen on that list appeared doable this year. For example, he said, renovations to the high school science rooms in the overall school renovation plan relied on the middle schools merging to free up space to use at Harwood during construction. The science wing work will not fit into a summer schedule when the building is not in use, Daigle explained.

That’s why the Waitsfield kitchen project is the only request at this time, Daigle said. 

The request to the board will be to approve funds for engineering and architectural designs needed to seek bids. The Maintenance Reserve Fund does not typically cover those costs, Daigle said. 

TruexCullins submitted a project proposal outlining the pre-bid, bid and pre-construction process dated Oct. 24. It shows a cost of $78,600 to cover the next phase of the project through contract administration. Of that, $48,000 would pay Truex for design, construction plans, and managing the bidding and negotiation process. 

Leichliter said the timeline pre-bidding would be about 10-12 weeks. Bidding, selecting a contractor, etc. could take until May with an eye toward construction occurring next summer and completed before school starts in the fall 2023. 

The board’s next meeting is Nov. 9. 

Other board business 

Some other actions the School Board has taken recently include: 

• Appropriating $2,000 for staff appreciation. The board agreed to set aside the funds to provide some special acknowledgement for teachers and staff in each school. Warren board member Ashley Woods pointed out that the sum amounted to about $5 per person, so the gesture would be modest. At last week’s meeting, board Chair Kristen Rodgers said it would involve food and she and Vice Chair Hackett volunteered to coordinate the effort over the course of the school year. 

• Approved an agenda request for the administration to review school mascots given a new mascot policy that was adopted several weeks ago. The policy follows a new state law that calls for mascots and school branding to be non-discriminatory. Superintendent Leichliter said most of the mascots would not raise any issues as they are “cougars, eagles, foxes, bobcats, wolverines and a tree,” (the latter being at Warren Elementary). “The one that would be a discussion point would be our Highlander,” he said. 

• Approved an agenda request from Duxbury member Life LeGeros asking that the board devote time to discussing its oversight role for the district related to contingency planning regarding respiratory and airborne illnesses including COVID-19. LeGeros shared a slide presentation outlining recent public health statistics and advocated for the district to be ready for potential surges of illnesses circulating in the community. Harwood Union Middle/High School two weeks ago had 10 cases of COVID-19 voluntarily reported from families triggering a report to the state Department of Health. Others during public comment recently have asked school officials about plans to respond should illnesses spike in the coming weeks and winter months. On Wednesday, Waterbury Congregational Church Pastor Peter Plagge raised the topic to the board saying: “I encourage you to continue to be serious and vigilant about the transmission of COVID-19 in our community and the health risks that it poses –  still. I do understand the impetus to stop talking about COVID, but ignoring a pandemic before it's over, as history has shown us, is not wise.”  

• Approved a job description for a nurse leader position for the district. Harwood is one of 11 districts to receive a $79,000 state grant from the Health Department’s Division of Maternal and Child Health. The aim is to have an existing school nurse take on this leadership role with the funding also paying for substitute coverage for that staffer to take on additional duties three days per week for one year. The full description is in the Oct. 26 meeting packet. 

• Appointed members Victoria Taravella of Waterbury and Woods to the committee that will work on negotiating a new contract for school district support staff this school year. The district’s lawyer Pietro Lynn will assist with that negotiation with the staff’s union representatives. 

• Formed a Restraint and Seclusion Policy Subcommittee that will review any potential changes to district policy that may come from a review underway by the administration and staff regarding the use of prone restraints and seclusion with students as methods to deal with behavior issues. The practices have come under scrutiny after former school board member and Brookside Primary School special educator Brian Dalla Mura called attention to an unusually high number of reported uses of them according to state and federal data in recent years. Leichliter has tasked administrators and staff to look into the issue and make recommendations. Should changes in school policy be appropriate, the members of the school board’s policy subcommittee on the matter are Cindy Senning (Duxbury), Bobbi Rood (Waitsfield), Marlena Tucker-Fishman (Waterbury), Taravella and Woods.

The superintendent shared a slide presentation last week highlighting the results and themes from the online community survey he conducted between June and August. Some 660 responses came in from parents, students and community members offering input on open-ended questions Leichliter posed asking what the district’s strengths are and how it can be improved. 

From the survey, Leichliter has proposed several key goals to work on this year: improving academic success and school climate in the district; budget development, community relations, and facilities needs. The board discussed these and made suggestions that they incorporate several other key ideas including equity and milestones to measure progress. Leichliter said he would make some revisions and present the list at the next meeting with a caution that he wanted to avoid “over promising and under delivering” given that the academic year is already in progress.  

Annual Retreat

The School Board held its annual retreat on Oct. 12 at the Mad River Barn. The three-hour public session included discussion on a wide range of topics for the year that included the superintendent sharing themes from the community survey he conducted from June through August; expectations for board members around interacting with the community; discussion of how reports are made to the board from the finance director and superintendent. The group also covered setting a process with the superintendent regarding goals for this year and an evaluation process for his first year.  

The retreat was recorded by Mad River Valley Television and the video is available to watch online at MRVTV.com. 

The school board meets in the library at Harwood Union Middle/High School library on the second and fourth Wednesdays of each month at 6 p.m. November meetings will be Nov. 9 and 16 due to the Thanksgiving holiday. The public also may join via Zoom. Meetings are recorded and are available to watch online. More information is online at HUUSD.org under the board tab.