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Henrico officials moved one step closer to beginning their most auspicious simultaneous school construction efforts in the county's history June 25 – but constructing new versions of J.R. Tucker and Highland Springs high schools could cost $30 million more than originally expected.
At its June 25 meeting, the Henrico Board of Supervisors approved plans of development for the new schools, whose combined construction could total $190 million instead of $160 million (the amount county officials had projected initially).
Construction on both facilities will begin in September, and the new schools are expected to open for the 2021-22 school year.
The $190-million price tag is the amount county officials included in the Fiscal Year 2019-20 budget they adopted in April but is $30 million more than what they anticipated spending when they announced the plans last September – and also $30 million more than the School Board requested in its approved budget proposal in February.
In September, County Manager John Vithoulkas announced that each project would cost $80 million and said that the county would use a combination of funding from a voter-approved bond referendum ($97 million), excess meals tax revenue ($26 million), the sale of Virginia Public School Authority bonds ($32.2 million) and other available funds ($4.8 million) to pay for them.
In an e-mail to the Citizen June 26, Vithoulkas described the $190 million price tag as an estimate.
"The budgets for the new Highland Springs and J.R. Tucker high schools are estimates based on the costs of projects throughout the Commonwealth," he wrote. "We won’t know the actual costs of these schools until we receive formal bids for the work. The county expects to request bids in July."
The anticipated price tag for each school rose by $15 million, according to Henrico Schools spokesman Andy Jenks, because of a combination of factors.
The initial $80-million-per-school projected cost "represented a fair outlook at the time that the projects were announced, based on the history of the construction of Glen Allen High School 10 years ago," Jenks told the Citizen. "What we have learned since then is that the construction market is in a much different place than it was 10 years ago."
Laborers are in demand, meaning contractors must pay more to attract them, for example.
In addition, Jenks said, county officials learned that site work at both locations will require more money than officials could have projected last year or even earlier this year.
At Tucker, officials will need to remediate a 75,000-square-foot site (remove soil that previously served as an organic disposal site and place special rammed aggregate piers in the ground to reinforce the soil), Jenks said.
At Highland Springs, officials will need to remove some soil as well and also relocate water and sewer lines, remediate some wetlands space and conduct four separate traffic engineering analyses for VDOT, he said.
Henrico officials originally planned to pay for the facilities through a combination of funding sources.
In the revised funding plan for the schools approved by the Board of Supervisors in April, $123 million for the two projects still will come from bond referendum funds and excess meals tax money. But the rest of the money will come from a variety of sources:
• $25 million in available bond premium funds;
• $13.7 million in Virginia Public School Authority bonds.
• $14 million in savings from approved bond projects;
• $9 million in additional meals tax revenue;
• $3 million from the sale of land near Three Chopt Elementary School;
• $2 million in interest earnings;
The two school projects both will be based generally upon the design of Glen Allen High School.
The new version of Tucker High School will be situated facing Parham Road and sit partially where the school's existing football stadium is located. Students will continue attending class in the existing campus-style buildings until the new school is completed, and then crews will demolish the old buildings and construct a new football stadium near the back of the site adjacent to Homeview Drive.
That will mean that Tucker will be without a football stadium and field house for three years and without a gymnasium for two years.
At Highland Springs, the new school will be built away from the existing facility, adjacent to Beal Street facing South Airport Drive. The new school will be built partially on the site of the existing football stadium, necessitating the construction of a new one that would open when the new school does. The school also would be without its tennis courts until the new school opens.
Highland Springs students will continue attending class in the existing building until the new school is open. School and county officials haven't yet decided how they might use the existing school, but it could become a career and technical education center (for which $42 million was included in the 2016 bond referendum but is being redirected for the construction of the new school).
Contractors will begin bidding on the projects this month; bids for the Tucker project will open a week prior to bids for Highland Springs, Jenks said.
