Roof Work Starts on Middle Schools, Ice Rink

On one of the hottest days of the summer, if you factor in the humidity, a crew of about 18 men took to the roof Tuesday of the .

The crew is working to fix the leaky roof that School Committee member Joseph Crowley has said for months at School Committee meetings should have been repaired years ago.

Workers from Greenwood Industries of Millbury, MA, started the job Monday by stocking the site with roofing material, according to John D’Elia, the company’s vice president. Yellow flags flutter on lines around the perimeter of the flat roof over the school’s academic spaces.  A tractor-trailer-size dumpster sits at the rear of the school, adjacent to the building.

The contractor will try to have the roof over the school’s academic areas done by the time students return to classes at the end of the summer, according to Patrick Saitta, president of Municipal Building Consultants, Inc., which represents the city on the project.  Then they’ll work on the roof over the gym.

Beyond the roof work, certain school windows are going to be replaced in conjunction with the roof project. That should happen in October, depending, Saitta said Tuesday, on when the contractor gets the windows, which have a long order time.

Across town, more roof work is underway at the and adjacent, city-owned . Reliable Roofing is handling that work, Saitta said. The work should be done, he said, by the end of August.

The Framingham contractor has between 20 and 30 people working on that project, foreman Tony DeNapoli told Woburn Patch Wednesday. DeNapoli said he hopes the work is done before school starts. The contractor is starting with the rink roof, based on the job requirements, he said.  They did their roof safety prep this past Friday, DeNapoli said.

Some of the sheets of roof insulation that are mainly undamaged are being recycled, DeNapoli said, because this is a “green” job.

The city will receive just over half—51.21 percent—of certain costs for the school roof projects through the Massachusetts School Building Authority, under its Green Repair Program.

That means the city anticipates it will receive about $1.6 million from the state school building agency for the school roof work, based on bid-based cost estimates, according to Charles Doherty, city deputy auditor. The Kennedy project bid came in at $2.64 million, according to Doherty and Saitta, and $550,000, Doherty said, for the Joyce portion of the Joyce/O’Brien project.

The state school building authority will not pay for roof work on the ice rink.  So the city is picking up that whole tab, an estimated $550,000, Doherty told Woburn Patch Wednesday.

The main goals of the state agency’s Green Repair Program, according to a press release issued in March when the state announced a grant of up to $2.29 million to the city for those two school roof projects, are to “improve learning environments for children and teachers, reduce energy use and generate cost savings for districts” by helping to pay to “repair or replace roofs, windows and/or boilers in schools that are otherwise structurally, functionally and educationally sound.”

The estimated costs—and, therefore, the reimbursement—for the school roofs are lower now primarily because, Saitta explained, the state school building agency rescinded a new requirement that would have required seismic tie-ins between the school roofs and buildings.