Prince George’s County Public Schools is the second-largest school system in Maryland. It is also the second-oldest, with more than half of its 208 schools over 50 years old.
Like many school systems around the nation, Prince George’s faces rising enrollment with aging buildings and not enough seats. To address these shortfalls, the county has initiated an alternative construction financing program with some of the industry’s leading AEC firms, whose goal is to accelerate the time it takes to plan, finance, and build schools, and to reduce the cost of construction and maintenance.
COMMITMENT TO SMALL AND MINORITY BUSINESS PARTICIPATION
This consortium, known as Prince George’s County Education & Community Partners, this week broke ground on six K-8 and Middle schools whose completion is scheduled for the summer of 2023. The properties will be turned over to the consortium on July 1 to begin construction through a Public-Private partnership delivery approach. The consortium comprises Fengate Asset Management, an alternative investment manager focused on infrastructure, private equity, and real estate strategies; Gilbane Development Company (a financing member), Gilbane Building Company (the lead design-builder), Stantec (designer and AOR), and Honeywell (lead services provider).
Also see: Three AEC firms launch a mass timber product for quicker school construction
According to the Prince George’s County Public Schools “Blueprint Schools” website, Arel Architects, a certified county-based small business and minority business enterprise, is part of the design team and has a mentor protégé relationship with Stantec. Warren Builds Construction and Corenic Construction Group (also certified small and minority businesses) are on the construction team and have mentor protégé relationships with Gilbane. Three|E Consulting Group serves as the economic inclusion and compliance team.
The consortium is guaranteeing procurement of at least 30% of total eligible costs of the program to minority-owned businesses, community-based small businesses, and the creation of county-based jobs.
CUTTING THE PLAN-TO-BUILD TIME IN HALF
In Maryland, it typically takes seven years to plan and build a school. The consortium’s members believe the county’s alternative financing approach can cut that time in half, and save an aggregate of $174 million in deferred maintenance and construction costs for all six new schools, compared to a traditional construction procurement model.
The six schools under construction create 3,000 jobs and will result in upgraded facilities for more than 8,000 students and their families.
Prince George’s County claims to be the first public school system in the U.S. to leverage a full-scope alternative financing model to design, build, finance, and maintain a multi-school K-12 construction program.
“We have made tremendous strides in the area of long-range facility planning to advance from a capital program of primarily emergency repair projects toward a major modernization program with a plan to address each older facility in our inventory over the next 20 years,” says Dr. Monica Goldson, CEO of Prince George’s County Public Schools. “The Blueprint Schools initiative helps us accelerate delivery of new schools and modernizations for safe, sustainable, educational facilities to fully support 21st Century instruction for our students, staff, and community.”
Related Stories
| Aug 11, 2010
Bronze Award: Garfield High School, Seattle, Wash.
Renovations to Seattle's historic Garfield High School focused mainly on restoring the 85-year-old building's faded beauty and creating a more usable and modern interior. The 243,000-sf school (whose alumni include the impresario Quincy Jones) was so functionally inadequate that officials briefly considered razing it.
| Aug 11, 2010
Managing the K-12 Portfolio
In 1995, the city of New Haven, Conn., launched a program to build five new schools and renovate and upgrade seven others. At the time, city officials could not have envisioned their program morphing into a 17-year, 44-school, $1.5 billion project to completely overhaul its entire portfolio of K-12 facilities for nearly 23,000 students.
| Aug 11, 2010
Financial Wizardry Builds a Community
At 69 square miles, Vineland is New Jersey's largest city, at least in geographic area, and it has a rich history. It was established in 1861 as a planned community (well before there were such things) by the utopian Charles Landis. It was in Vineland that Dr. Thomas Welch found a way to preserve grape juice without fermenting it, creating a wine substitute for church use (the town was dry).
| Aug 11, 2010
School Project Offers Lessons in Construction Realities
Imagine this scenario: You're planning a $32.9 million project involving 112,000 sf of new construction and renovation work, and your job site is an active 32-acre junior-K-to-12 school campus bordered by well-heeled neighbors who are extremely concerned about construction noise and traffic. Add to that the fact that within 30 days of groundbreaking, the general contractor gets canned.
| Aug 11, 2010
High Tech High International used to be a military facility
High Tech High International, reconstructed inside a 1952 Navy metal foundry training facility, incorporates the very latest in teaching technology with a centerpiece classroom known as the UN Theater, which is modeled after the UN chambers in New York. The interior space, which looks more like a hip advertising studio than a public high school, provides informal, flexible seating areas, abunda...
| Aug 11, 2010
High-Performance Modular Classrooms Hit the Market
Over a five-day stretch last December, students at the Carroll School in Lincoln, Mass., witnessed the installation of a modular classroom building like no other. The new 950-sf structure, which will serve as the school's tutoring offices for the next few years, is loaded with sustainable features like sun-tunnel skylights, doubled-insulated low-e glazing, a cool roof, light shelves, bamboo tri...
| Aug 11, 2010
Special Recognition: Pioneering Efforts Continue Trade School Legacy
Worcester, Mass., is the birthplace of vocational education, beginning with the pioneering efforts of Milton P. Higgins, who opened the Worcester Trade School in 1908. The school's original facility served this central Massachusetts community for nearly 100 years until its state-of-the-art replacement opened in 2006 as the 1,500-student Worchester Technical High School.
| Aug 11, 2010
BIM school, green school: California's newest high-performance school
Nestled deep in the Napa Valley, the city of American Canyon is one of a number of new communities in Northern California that have experienced tremendous growth in the last five years. Located 42 miles northeast of San Francisco, American Canyon had a population of just over 9,000 in 2000; by 2008, that figure stood at 15,276, with 28% of the population under age 18.
| Aug 11, 2010
8 Tips for Converting Remnant Buildings Into Schools
Faced with overcrowded schools and ever-shrinking capital budgets, more and more school districts are turning to the existing building stock for their next school expansion project. Retail malls, big-box stores, warehouses, and even dingy old garages are being transformed into high-performance learning spaces, and at a fraction of the cost and time required to build classrooms from the ground up.
| Aug 11, 2010
Special Recognition: Kingswood School Bloomfield Hills, Mich.
Kingswood School is perhaps the best example of Eliel Saarinen's work in North America. Designed in 1930 by the Finnish-born architect, the building was inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright's Prairie Style, with wide overhanging hipped roofs, long horizontal bands of windows, decorative leaded glass doors, and asymmetrical massing of elements.
