Crumbling high school a 'bomb' of maintenance problems

EAST PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Step into East Providence High School and you see shiny floors, freshly painted doors and ample lighting. Descend into the bowels of the 65-year-old facility, however, and you see a building held together with tape and wire.

"A catastrophic failure is a real possibility," said Nathan Cahoon, chairman of the school committee's building committee.

"We're operating on a wing and a prayer," said the district's new superintendent, Kathryn Crowley, quoting an electrical engineer who participated in a recent facilities study.

Years of deferred maintenance have left the 240,000-square-foot school woefully unsuited to meet the demands of a 21st-century high school. One science lab serves 1,450 students. The pool, once the pride of East Providence, has been empty for six years. The swim team practices at the Boys & Girls Club.

Windowsills are so rotted that many can't be opened.

While most schools show off their latest technology, Crowley and her team lead a Journal reporter on a tour they call "The good, the bad and the ugly."  Previous school leaders have been giving this tour for several years, yet little has been done.

Beneath the gym, some of the concrete support beams are crumbling. Steam pipes carrying heat to the classrooms are corroded. To get access to the pipes, you have to squeeze through a crawlspace littered with asbestos.

Although the school has a new boiler, it's almost impossible to move the heat to the classrooms, which means some rooms are super cold while others are steamy.

The main electrical switchboard is so old there are no longer any spare parts. Moreover, the metal cage that encloses it is rusting. A water mark shows where previous flooding left its mark.

"If the main electrical switchboard goes, we're done," said electrician Tom Heatherton.

Because the sewer lines are rotted, the school has a sewer gas issue, which master plumber Paul Santos calls "a bomb waiting to go off."

"This school has been patched together with duct tape and chewing gum," said Albert Escobar, the school's maintenance mechanic.

East Providence High School is emblematic of the pent-up demand for new school facilities across Rhode Island.

The average age of a school building in Rhode Island is 58 years old, according to a 2013 school facilities study. Rep. Gregg Amore, the high school's athletic director, estimates it would cost $700 million to bring the state's public school facilities up to snuff.

The same report identified East Providence High School as one of 14 school buildings needing major repairs or new construction.  

A January evaluation by the SLAM Collaborative, architects with offices in Boston and Connecticut, provides a devastating look into the facility's decades-long deterioration:

— The existing plumbing is barely functional. Some bathrooms lack hot water and the piping is severely corroded and breaking.

— Most classrooms only have two electrical outlets.

— Most of the wiring is original to the building and is wrapped in cloth, which is disintegrating.

— The central boilers that supply the steam heat have outlived their life expectancy.

— The main office is not near the visitors' entrance, posing a major security problem.

— Fire code violations abound, from the sprinkler system, which doesn't cover the entire building, to doors that lack panic hardware.

The report concludes that it would cost $99.5 million to renovate the school to current state standards. A new school on the same site would cost between $102 and $107 million, plus an additional $2.5 million to demolish the existing building. 

Cahoon calls the high school's steady decline "death by a million paper cuts." For 20 years, he said, the needs of the district's schools were ignored while city leaders refused to increase school spending.

School leaders say it's pointless to keep pouring money into a building whose time has passed. As Cahoon said, "a new building is the only way to go."

State education Commissioner Ken Wagner, who previously worked in New York, said he has never seen buildings that suffer from so much deferred maintenance as those in Rhode Island. Unlike other states, in Rhode Island, the school committee sets policy but the city council ultimately controls the school budget.

That's the story of East Providence, where the city council kept cutting school funding until the school department wound up with a $3-million deficit. A budget commission was appointed to manage the city's finances.  

Next month, a new report will detail the condition of school facilities throughout Rhode Island.

"Once the report comes out," Wagner said, "We hope to pool local and state bonding resources to make it easier for local communities to support these costs. ... These problems didn't come about overnight. But we have to have a process. Otherwise we'd be favoring one community over another."    

East Providence has formed a building committee, which is preparing the first phase of a school construction plan to be submitted to the Rhode Island Department of Education, which approves all school facilities renovations.

The real hurdle will be persuading voters to approve a bond of this magnitude. East Providence has historically been reluctant to raise taxes. And the city only gets reimbursed for 54 percent of its building costs.

"It's really a seminal moment," Cahoon said. The city can either fix problems piecemeal or "We can start over."

— lborg@providencejournal.com

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On Twitter: lborgprojo.com