The New Paltz Central School District is considering a range of options for a possible capital improvement plan with a price tag of up to $47,746,945, including an aquatics center with a swimming pool.
During a presentation to the board of education on Wednesday, August 7, Mike Lantier, a vice-president and engineer with H2M Architects + Engineers covered what has been established using a building condition survey conducted last year, as well as through discussions with the facilities committee and other district stakeholders and broken them into three distinct ranges of priorities. An aquatics center, which would cost an estimated $19,219,200, was alone in the third level of priorities.
“At this point what I’m presenting to you is really a condensed plan, a priority list which will also mirror a potential proposition plan if we do decide to go out to the public,” said Lantier
The district’s newest building, Lenape Elementary School, was built in 1992. New Paltz High School and the district’s bus garage were both built in 1968, Duzine Elementary School in 1963, and approaching its centennial, New Paltz Middle School in 1930.
“While the district has done a very good job of maintaining the buildings like everything else there’s always so much that can be done,” Lantier said. “Unfortunately buildings do require infrastructure upgrades, they require maintenance and also the needs of the district do change so there are some additional components, some new components included within this presentation as well.”
Cited as most urgent are improvements and upgrades across the district, totaling $17,878,249, with nearly half that amount — $8,987,722 — earmarked for Lenape. The high school ($4,424,878), middle school ($2,698,170), Duzine ($20,592) and bus garage ($168,168) would also see work done, with a further $1,578,720 earmarked for other districtwide improvements.
The presentation was a summary and did not include some building-specific information, but among the line items on possible Proposition #1 were LED lighting upgrades, home bleacher and press box improvements, locker room renovations, window and door upgrades, roof replacements, boiler room upgrades in the high school, water storage tank replacements and many others.
Proposition #2 was largely focused on athletics, with the estimated $10,577,424 covering items like a new turf and scoreboard for Floyd Patterson field, new tennis courts, a new eight-lane track and various other upgrades.
As Proposition #3, a new aquatics center would be roughly 15,000-square-feet, with six 25-yard swimming lanes, and a depth between 5-and-13-feet. Costs to build the center would also include locker rooms, bathrooms and showers, with the latter required by the state Department of Health.
Lantier said the hard costs of the aquatics center would be closer to $14 million, with around $4.8 million in incidentals, and roughly $739,000 in escalation. Lantier estimated that the base cost to maintain the aquatics center could come in at around $17,000 per year, including water testing and chemicals.
Though cited as least urgent by planners, a new aquatics center received strong support from a handful of speakers during the school board meeting.
Merritt Minnemeyer is a mother of three NPCSD students, one of whom just graduated, the other two about to enter their sophomore year; she said she was grateful for the proposal’s inclusion of an aquatics center. And while the district’s competitive swimming program has earned many accolades over the years, she touted the benefits of swimming for other children too, including one of her sons, who she said was recently classified with a challenging set of mental health diagnoses.
“In a recent study that I just read published by the NIH (National Institutes of Health), the authors found that people who engage in aquatic exercise saw specifically a significant improvement in mental health symptoms,” Minnemeyer said. “This includes depression, anxiety, sensory processing, strength, and motor skills, coordination, proprioception, competence and much more…I was just thinking about imagining if every student starting in kindergarten or pre-K, from high performers all the way down to the kids who struggle every day like my kids do, and every kid in between, had access to the benefits that a pool provides, just by virtue of the facilities and maybe some useful programming for every student. If we could actually increase the mental health and mental well-being of every student in the district, what an incredible impact that would have.”
Camille D’Amico also supports the aquatics center plan, in part because her son Matthew is a swimmer entering his sophomore year at New Paltz High.
“I just would like to speak to the struggle that the swimmers and families of the swimmers have been dealing with in supporting our athletes,” she said, noting that practice takes place in the evening in the pool at SUNY New Paltz.
“Matthew comes home (from school), he tries to eat a little something in enough time that it’s out of his belly by the time he gets in the pool, which means he scarfs down something at four o’clock, and then he swims,” she said. “And then he comes home and showers the chlorine off, and then collapses. And when I try to poke him at 9.30, ‘Did you do homework?’ ‘I’ll do it at school tomorrow..’”
She said her son’s grades have suffered due to an entire season of that schedule.
“But when I met with the athletes from, say, Washingtonville that have their own pool, gee, those kids are coming straight from the end of the day into the pool, or they’re showing up early morning before school, right in the pool, and they have the rest of their evening to, you know, eat, sleep, do their homework,” she said. “And it’s a real different impact on the athlete.”
Focusing on a different aspect of the potential proposals, Joe Londa suggested savings for an increasingly expensive school district — one with looming environmental mandates — could be realized by closing one of its elementary schools.
“In 2014, we had 2,211 students at a cost of $23,000 per student,” Londa said. “In the current fiscal year coming up, we have had, I think we estimated 1675 students with an estimate of a cost of $44,000 per student. That’s an eight percent increase per year. If we stay on this trajectory, there’s a 3% escalation in the cost and the continued 100 students per kindergarten in five years’ time, we’ll be down to 1,450 students, which is a 35% decline and a $60,000 cost per student.”
He said that bringing down overall costs and creating a single elementary school could be a boon for the district.
“In doing so, you’ll reduce the fixed cost, reduce security risk, create a better teaching environment with full air-conditioning, and improve the air quality with better ventilation and no fumes,” Londa said.
Should the district move forward with a facilities project, it could seek public approval by this December. To hit that timeline, the board of education would have to approve the scope of work by Wednesday, September 4, voting to proceed with a bond referendum two weeks later.
The design phase on the project could begin by mid-January 2025, with a targeted submission to the state Education Department (SED) by September 2025. Upon receipt of approval from the SED, estimated in January 2026, bid could go out with a planned construction date in July 2026. The project would then be completed around November 2027, though the aquatics center could add additional design and construction time.
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