SWAMPSCOTT — A joint meeting was held by the Select Board, School Committee, Finance Committee, and the Capital Improvement Committee on Thursday evening to discuss the Town’s 5-year capital improvement plan.
The meeting began with a presentation from department heads after Town Administrator Nick Connors spoke briefly about the projects.
“The goal here is to guide all our work by looking at long-term planning and ongoing and preventative maintenance… financially aligning what we can do, what we’d like to do, and what we need to do,” Connors said.
He continued, “There’s a lot of communities out there that only use free cash; they don’t do long-term planning… We’re laying out all of the work that has gone into this, which puts us in a much better position.”
Connors added that he felt it was important to recognize the work undertaken by the different boards and committees regarding capital projects.
Facilities Director Max Kasper went through a list of capital projects for the Town.
FY27 capital requests included the Library HVAC/Controls for $100,000, Library flooring for $100,000, Fish House exterior improvements for $150,000, and the Reach Arts building at 89 Burrill St., though no plan or estimated total was mentioned. Also included were the Swampscott High School flooring replacement, SHS Cyber Cafe, and Guidance Buildout for $150,000 as well as the district security improvements for $700,000.
Kasper said the window replacement project for the middle school is a “big project that we appropriated the design for last year.”
“We’ve completed our review process, and we’re in the process of hiring a design firm to do the work. This is likely to replace all of the windows for the building,” Kasper said.
Other projects mentioned were: SHS HVAC study for $100,000, SHS parking lot and solar canopy design for $300,000, SHS envelope improvements for $100,000, and a Swampscott Elementary School solar canopy for $2 million.
“The high school is coming up on 20 years old. It’s actually in quite good shape, but we are starting to see some failures with the HVAC system… We want to be proactive about what we’re going to do over time; the first step is to shape what those larger projects down the road will look like,” Kasper said.
Major town projects for FY28-FY31, as a part of the Town’s 5-year plan, include the new library entries for $1 million and renovations to the fire station for $3 million, which are both slated for FY28. And the construction of the new DPW yard for $15 million is slated to begin in FY29.
Also included were major renovations for SMS for $100 million in FY29 and an SMS alternate systems upgrade for $50 million in FY29.
Director of the Department of Public Works Gino Cresta went over the list of DPW capital projects.
Some named during the presentation were: a new DPW facility for $5,500,000; Sewer Main Rehabilitation Phase 2B for $3,500,000; water main replacement for $300,000; replacement of the track at Upper Jackson Park for $1,00,000; painting the water tower, which costs $750,000; sewer vacuum truck at $650,000 ($300,000 was funded through grant money); water main replacement for $500,000; Eisman’s Beach seawall repairs for $250,000; equipment replacement for $185,000; and life station upgrades for $120,000.
For Swampscott Public Schools, the Town is looking to upgrade technology in the gym for SHS and SMS such as projectors, screens, and speakers. Slated for FY27, the estimated total is $200,000. An area of improvement is the SMS cafeteria technology for new public announcements for $100,000. The Town is also looking to acquire new speakers for the high school.
Director of Technology for Swampscott Public Schools Lytania Mackey then went through some of the projects for the various schools.
“The high school is coming up on 20 years old, and when you think about the equipment in the high school, it came in 2006… We bundled the high school and the middle school gym technology together. The high school’s gym is used for a lot of community and internal events,” Mackey said.
She noted that the gym in the high school has never had a projector or screen, and that “it’s more a place where anyone in the school could go into the gym and be using it.”
“It just makes the gym more accessible for the community, and it also raises the amount that we can rent it for when we have all those systems in place… We’re looking to upgrade that space with some technology so that you could present to at least three grades comfortably in the school,” Mackey said.
Mackey also stressed the importance of replacing the speakers in the high school building as they’re part of the school’s emergency system.
Staff device upgrades for Swampscott Public Schools would provide staff with more modern technology to help teach their students. Paraprofessionals and Applied Behavior Analysis tutors have access to machines that are five to six years old, but they don’t have enough processing power for complex teaching software. The total for the plan, slated for FY27, is $100,000
Mackey also noted that it was important to replace devices provided for students in classrooms — such as Chromebooks and iPads.
“At the elementary and middle schools, we test the students multiple times based on state requirements, the high school as well. It’s still required for students to take MCAS. Even though they don’t need it to graduate, they still have to take it, and those all require the same type of platform… And you have to have about 700 devices available because otherwise testing would take two months out of the school year,” Mackey explained.
Mackey added that the schools want to be proactive on the matter.
She continued, “The sixth, seventh, and eighth graders are using some devices that are hand-me-downs from high school seniors, and so it’s like Frankenstein down there, but we know that we’ll have to refresh those soon.”
