Building in the Time of COVID-19

Project Progress: Over the past couple of weeks the temporary faculty parking lot has been paved and striped and the construction fencing around the temporary school has been coming down!

Packing Up: This week the Lincoln School staff began the process of packing their classrooms and offices for the upcoming move! With the school closure extended through the end of the school year, the administration worked with our team of architects from SMMA and Consigli Construction to create a plan to begin the move process in order to create more time for construction.
The Lincoln School was originally scheduled to be packed and moved by late June. The revised timeline now brings the completion of the move to the end of the first week of June allowing Consigli access to the building the week of June 8th. This will not affect the already established overall timeline of the project but will provide some additional time to allow for unexpected delays due to unforeseen conditions or potential work delays due to COVID-19. Consigli may begin work that will not interfere with the packing and move prior to June 8th. In order to ensure the safety of all of our staff involved with the packing and move, a comprehensive protocol was developed to make certain there is minimal contact between persons and that all surfaces are cleaned before and after each space is occupied. Small numbers of staff are scheduled throughout the building on specific days and times over the course of three weeks. When teachers are packing, their team members are covering remote learning from home for their students. This is a huge endeavor under challenging conditions. We owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to our Lincoln School faculty, staff, and administrators, as well as, our facilities and technology staff who are all going above and beyond to make this happen! We will be prepared to start the next school year in the temporary modular building and the Smith portion of the Lincoln School. – from Superintendent Becky McFall

Town Meeting/Town Election Update: The Town Moderator and Board of Selectmen have rescheduled Town Meeting for Saturday, June 13th and the Town Election for Monday, June 15th. As of now, the State of Emergency extends through May 18th. Because Lincoln had already signed a Town Meeting warrant back in February, we are required to hold Town Meeting within 30 days of the lifting of the State of Emergency. This is why the date was set for mid June. To meet the deadlines for holding a Town Meeting/Elections, Town boards and committees need to move full steam ahead to plan for both events. If the state of emergency is extended? Well…at least we’ll be prepared!

Meeting This Week! The SBC is meeting via Zoom this Wednesday, 7:00pm (Details to join the meeting will be posted along with the agenda on Monday. Visit https://www.lincnet.org/Page/4876.) In addition to a construction update, the main purpose of the meeting will be to review the list of value engineered items that the SBC had planned to bring to a vote in March. These are the ~$2M worth of items that were eliminated from the project to keep it on budget, but that the SBC decided were important to the long-term value of the project. At Wednesday’s meeting, the SBC will get an update from the Finance Committee about the current state of Town’s financial picture and discuss how best to move forward with that list.