Special Meeting About Elementary School Repairs Planned

A special Southern Lehigh School Board meeting will be held Wednesday, Aug. 28, to discuss a demographic study and life/cost analysis recently performed to identify future needs of the district's three elementary schools.

"The life/cost analysis identified anticipated 10 year construction costs at Hopewell and Lower Milford," a summary posted on the school district's website states. "Liberty Bell was notincluded in the life/cost study since it underwent a fullrenovation in 1999."

Last month the school board announced that Hopewell—which was built in 1970—may need $12 million in repairs. Lower Milford, which was built in 1950, may need renovations totaling about $3 million, according to a preliminary analysis.

At the school board's meeting Monday, board member Thomas McLoughlin called the potential renovations at Hopewell "significant," in part because it has "some challenging physical characteristics, such as plumbing which is embedded into slab cement."

Unlike the other two schools, Hopewell has not had any significant renovations since it was constructed, he noted.

The building "has been maintained to extend the functioning of systems well beyond their life expectancy," according to the life/cost analysis posted online.

Board member Elizabeth Stelts said a PowerPoint presentation for the Aug. 28 meeting, which will be prepared in advance, will be posted on the district website sometime in July.

"If people are interested they should keep an eye out for that," she said.

A time for the Aug. 28 meeting is still to be determined.