Potential Bidders Tour Cutler, West Side Middle Schools

Ten companies toured Cutler and West Side Middle Schools Friday as potential bidders for portable classrooms, and the school facilities director said he’s waiting to hear whether the contractors believe most of the work could be done by the opening of school.

The department has set a date of Aug. 28 for the bulk of work to be done. Students return to school Aug. 29.

“Our ” said Wes Greenleaf, director of facilities and grounds for Groton Public Schools. “We will not shift that unless we are convinced it’s undoable.”

The contractors visited the schools as part of a mandatory, pre-bid walk through to learn more about the project and rules associated with it.

Portable classrooms are pre-manufactured buildings, but because the State Department of Education considers them permanent school structures, they must be modified to meet code.

Groton is in a hurricane zone, so windows must be built to withstand a 120-mile-per-hour impact, for example. Roofs must be built with a pitch that is higher than the national buildng code.

“There are a lot of regulations today and they have to know them all,” Greenleaf said.

Specifications for the project are 100 pages long, and were sent electronically. The state granted approval on June 19 for the bidding to go forward, and the school department advertised the project on June 22 and 26.

Greenleaf said the department also contacted every company that manufactures prefabricated buildings in Connecticut and adjacent states.

The bid opening is scheduled for 2 p.m. on July 12 in his office..

Groton is building two double-classroom portables for Cutler Middle School and one double-classroom portable for West Side to accommodate additional students since the district closed Fitch Middle School this year. Groton is eligible for 57 percent state reimbursement for the classrooms.

Greenleaf said in an earlier interview that if the project is delayed, the district could accommodate the additional students for a couple of weeks by having classes like language arts on a cart, rather than in a dedicated room.

This could be done because middle schools are arranged differently than junior high schools, where every room is full. Instead, the schools dedicate four classrooms to each team of students. Since there are eight periods in a day and students attend other classes like gym, not all rooms are occupied all the time.