Contractors are expected to replace a portion of Taylorsville Elementary’s roof later this year.
The Bartholomew Consolidated School Corp. school board has approved a contract with Southern Roofing, Inc. for the project, said Director of Operations Brett Boezeman. The contract amount is $251,300; this includes a base bid of $248,700 and a $2,600 alternate for replacing metal capping around the building’s exterior.
The project is estimated to take roughly eight to nine weeks, said Boezeman. Workers will start to mobilize around late spring or early summer. While they plan to do most of the work over the summer, it is likely to continue into the fall but is not expected to affect school operations.
According to Boezeman, BCSC replaced most of Taylorsville’s roof four years ago as a warranty replacement. This latest project focuses on an eastern portion of the roof that is mostly over the kindergarten wing.
“We believe that’s a 1996 roof,” he said. “So it’s held up really well, but it’s considered end of life and needs to be replaced. So it’s just a portion, maybe a fourth of the entire roof structure, would be replaced under this contract.”
BCSC has budgeted the roofing work through its capital projects fund. They had budgeted it for 2022 and planned to bid it that same year, but the estimates were higher than expected, so school officials decided to hold off.
“Which actually paid off pretty well, because we had — they were getting estimates at the time of this being nearly a $400,000 project, and obviously you can see we came in well under that,” said Boezeman. “So that was a good decision and significant savings for us.”
Boezeman noted that school corporation previously put solar panels on a portion of the school’s roof, which have resulted in savings of about 40% on electricity costs. The panels are present on the newer section of roof and will not be affected by the current replacement project.
The school corporation does not plan to add panels to the section that is set to be replaced.
“We do have interest with other buildings, as we replace roof systems on other school buildings to place solar panels on them, on those that are appropriate, good candidates,” said Boezeman. “The reason I don’t think we would at Taylorsville — we designed that project basically so the lowest month out of the calendar year that we use electricity, which is usually June or July, we design the solar project around those months, so we don’t want to overproduce and overdesign. So that’s what we have up there right now. So I don’t think we have any need to expand the solar field that’s up there already.”
