New FHN Construction had Drastic Changes to the Budget
Credit to Andrew Goffinet
On Feb. 10 the construction crew works on finishing the foundation of the new school, and began to expand the building into the old track area, as of now they are working on the back corner of the construction site. The plans for the construction for next week are to add steel to the foundation of the school. Even with the budget issues going on with the construction the planned date of completion is still to be in the Fall of 2024.
There has been a lot of debate and problems surrounding Prop S especially when it comes to the construction of the new Francis Howell North. Last month there was a story about the district. The story was on ‘Fox 2 News’ in a segment called ‘You Paid For It’. During this segment reporter Elliot Davis interviewed administrators and community members about the situation dealing with the construction
Davis reported that the district figured the school was going to cost about $86.3 million however, the final bid came out to be $164.7 million. By this time construction had been underway and while they expected prices to be higher by about 10% they didn’t expect this.
“Once the work started and as we were moving forward, we started to understand that yes, there were going to be some increases to the cause,” Superintendent Nathan Hoven said. “Never did we expect them to come in as high as they did”
While the price of the school is significantly bigger than originally planned there are ways for the price of the school to still go down. It is called Value Engineering
Work is still ongoing to continue to find ways to bring the cost down,” Hoven said. “They look at ways that they can find alternate options within the current building, that won’t hurt the quality of the building, but could save some money”
For those who want more information on this matter it’s a topic at almost every board meeting. For past board meetings the can be found on the Francis Howell school district website under the district tab.
“At every board meeting we do give an update,” Hoven said. “That includes pictures and some slides. Sometimes we’ve had some drone videos at times. So if they wanted to look at any one of our board meeting agenda, they could see the updates from that month that we’ve provided for the board in public.”
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