The City of Fall River is gearing up to hire a company to oversee the new Durfee High School renovation project.
According to Director of Buildings & Grounds, Ken Pacheco, nine (9) companies have applied for the position of Owners Management Operator of the multi-million dollar project.
“We narrowed that list to five (5) firms, and are mostly focused on one or two with the qualifications to oversee the scheduling of the project,” Pacheco said.
The renovation choices include: Razing the current structure and building a brand new school; renovating the current building as it now stands; or creating a hybrid, the latter meaning to keep portions of the existing structure, and building new additions around it.
Presently, BMC Durfee High school can accommodate 38 hundred students as per the original design, although only 21 hundred young adults are being educated there right now. The new plan is to have a school that will serve 25 hundred students, which Pachecco says will be enough room judging on an analysis of future student population estimates over the next ten years.
“Students who get to the high school level have other choices than attending Durfee,” Pacheco says, “including charter and vocational schools like Diman.”
According to Pachecco, the company hired to conduct the year long feasibility study will be chosen in mid-September at an approximate cost of a million dollars. The final choice will be presented to the Massachusetts School Building Authority which is a state agency that will fund 80 percent of the project, with the city picking up 20 percent of the tab.
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