BOE President Discusses School Improvement Timeline

Plans are underway to begin construction on local schools after Rockville Centre residents passed a $45.9 million school improvement bond on March 19.

The bond will go toward structural improvements and enhancements at each of the five elementary schools, as well as South Side Middle School and High School and the administrative building.

"We're actually going to try to do some of the smaller projects during the summer [of 2013]," Rockville Centre Board of Education President Liz Dion told Patch.

While some projects can be started this summer, Dion said that projects like the turf field will need state approval.

"We'll put that through and hopefully get it done in the fall or early winter," she said.

Smaller projects like the turf field might be started within the next year, but Dion said that bigger construction will not begin until the summer of 2014.

"What we'll be doing over the next few weeks and months is just going through the details of the plans, finalizing them, and then sending them up to the state," Dion said.

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The board president said the state takes approximately seven months to approve plans.

"We're hoping to get approval by the spring so that we can start next summer; and that would be for the bigger constructions -- the construction of the first wing in the high school and Watson," she said.

According to Dion, the district would like to have all of the construction completed by the summer of 2016, but that date wasn't definite.

"The high school will take two years from when it begins," Dion said. "So it's supposed to begin in 2014, which means it's ending in the end of the summer of 2016 and there will probably be a little more work to be done after that."

The board of education will have its first post-vote meetings with the project's architects right after spring break. The meeting should help determine how they will proceed in terms of planning the entire project.

"Just because the bond vote is over, this is just the beginning," Dion said. "Now we really have to make some final decisions because we want to move forward."