Mike McGourty's Public Works Presentation on Highlands Elementary

Mike McGourty, Director of Public Works gave an overview of the school building assessment on September 16th, 2024, School Committee meeting. Each of the town’s 11 school buildings was given a rating. Number 1, and highest rated was the New South Middle school, number 11 and lowest rated was Hollis.

Breaking out each of the updates on each school, the next school in use by the district is Highlands at #9.

· Flooring contains asbestos and needs to be abated throughout the school
· Interior classrooms need updating to paint and plaster
· Electrical service needs to be updated to support any new HVAC equipment
· Plumbing service needs updating to support new fixtures
· Phased asbestos abatement needed
· Steam piping system requires constant monitoring and repair
· Boiler room piping issues
· Boiler room Electrical sub-panel

Like the overview of the state of Hollis, Highlands represents most of the bigger issues for the buildings.

Here's the video for the section on Highlands: https://www.youtube.com/live/6c-ad6BGZIE?t=2025s

Tell the school committee and town council they need to do the following.

1. Report on every problem in the schools, costed out. We don’t need to have this done quickly but put together a plan for this information. As Mike said, the team are in the schools every day. Assess as they work. It can be done.
2. Build a live update of the school maintenance, state of capital, situation and costs. Other schools can provide this. Braintree can too.
3. A long-term plan for how we are going to incrementally improve things. Again, we are not expecting everything to get done overnight. But understand where we are today and what’s possible tomorrow.

Ask the school committee and town council today.

schoolcommittee@braintreeschools.org
TownCouncilors@braintreema.gov