NORTH ADAMS, Mass. — The steel frame for the new Greylock School was being hauled into place on Monday. 

 

A large crane was moving several beams at a time as the skeleton for the east side of the 73,000-square-foot school took shape. 

 

The foundations are in place and the final concrete slabs were poured last week. The horizontal drilling for the geothermal wells have been started as well. 

 

"We are still on on pace to open the building and be substantially complete by July of next year," said Todd Ashford, project manager with Collier's International, the city's owner's project manager, at last week's School Building Committee meeting. 

 

"The contractor's original construction schedule, which they submitted back when signing the contract is still accurate."

 

All the underground utilities are in place, he said, with the expectation the steel would be delivered and positioned by Monday and the erection would start on Tuesday. 

 

However, by early Monday afternoon, the first story of the northeast corner was completed next to what will be the gym. 

 

Project leader Jeffrey Manley, Collier's liaison between the city and contractor Fontaine Bros., gave a tour of the site on Thursday morning, pointing out the gym, and the new open courtyard within the building, and explaining where the geothermal wells were going and the large cavity that will be the stormwater system to the south. 

 

So far about four geothermal wells have been drilled with about 30 planned. The drilling has been on hold for about a week waiting for a shipment of grout. 

 

Manley said the project has been going very smoothly with few hiccups.  

 

The committee was told last week that some things in the schedule have been switched around but everything is moving along.

 

"Once the steel starts going up, it'll look like things are really moving. It takes shape pretty quickly, and then it'll appear to slow down because they got to fill in all that steel," said Timothy Alix of Colliers, at last week's meeting.

 

"So you'll see a lot of activity over the next month, month and a half, as the steel is going up, and the the neighbors will be able to see the building taking shape. So it'll be exciting next month and a half as the steel is going in." 

 

In other business, the committee approved invoices for monitoring, abatement of the former school and construction and design to date. 

 

"We are still healthy financially in the project," said Ashford. "We've really not dipped into this contingency at all in the first few months. A lot of that is attributed to a lot of change orders being covered by some credits early on in the project ...  

"We have not had to dip into construction contingency or owners [contingency] yet, which is nice at this  point, especially because getting out of the ground is typically where you will start to spend quite a bit of that money early on in the project."

 

Jesse Saylor of TSKP Design Studio said the design team has met with the superintendent, teachers and Technology Director Moty Nevo on technology equipment. 

 

"As you can imagine, interactive displays are a key component to our educational delivery method, and so we we talked about the types of interactive display and the locations. There are also some non-interactive displays in the project," he said. "We talked about network switches and the phone system, all of which is kind of lumped into our technology equipment package."

 

The team is developing technology packages for procurement later in the fall or early winter.  

 

Committee member Richard Alcombright asked what thoughts have gone into the future of Brayton School, which will be closed next year when Greylock opens. He referred to the still vacant Sullivan School, closed when Colegrove Park Elementary opened. 

 

"I don't think I put the amount of effort into Sullivan that should have been put into it at the time," said the former mayor. "I think at the time it was pretty much kind of one of those things that I just thought something would happen with it."

 

Mayor Jennifer Macksey said city officials are discussing it, but noted that part of the property, like Sullivan, falls under Article 97 recreation land, which has to be dealt with. 

 

"We have also applied for One Stop [state funding program] for some technical assistance to do some analytics around what does that building do for us, if it's a healthy living environment, if it's you know an elderly complex if it's affordable housing, and how do we tie that into the recreation center?" she said. "So we're looking for some analytics around that and what the market is dictating. 

 

"We all know we need more housing, but that might be not the right location. So we are internally taking steps to keep that property moving, so to say."