New Hampshire: The Real Facts

We have spent many man-hours reviewing the situation at the Keene Middle School; its condition, and events that led us to our current state of affairs. I requested all documents pertaining to the Keene Middle School using NH’s Right to Know Law and used them as the basis for this report. This law gives citizen’s access to all public documents upon request from a governing body.

I made the RTK request to the Keene School District, The City of Keene, & the State of NH Fire Marshall in Concord.

There are a number of issues to bring forward and I will provide just a summary of those tonight. Due to the depth of information & lengthy chain of events, a more detailed presentation will occur at a later date directly to the public.

The board authorized $10,000 in Sept. of 2006 to be paid to Banwell Architects to conduct an analysis of Keene Middle School relative to current code compliance and safety issues, and to conduct an analysis of the feasibility of building a new middle school on property owned by the school district on Maple Avenue.’ Where are those final reports?

Then the district apparently authorized another $30,000 of year-end surplus money in June of 2007 to be used for further study by Banwell. There is no RFP, or written request from the School District to Banwell or I would have received it with my RTK request. So apparently someone from the district, SAU 29 Administration, or the Keene School Board, communicated in some way other than written, to Banwell asking for his or her services. All services greater than $5000 are supposed to go out for ‘Three (3) written quotes’ per School Board policy #3310. Heck, the board didn’t even make its request in writing! So there were no quotes. We still have no final report from Banwell. Yet, this board asked the community for a million dollars for you guessed it, more studies and a final architectural plan.

The only document that the City, State, & School Board all had was Fire Inspection Report from 8/25/2006 signed by Fire Captain Gary LaFreniere to SAU 29 Facilities Director Tom Remillard. This document lists the safety violations related to KMS. Capt. LeFreniere & Mr. Remillard again identifies these same issues in a November 2007 Fire Inspection Report signed. None had been remedied. So we broke these down to three categories, Operational Issues, Maintenance Issues, & Capital Cost Items. [Note: You can view the full list here.]

There are 64 violations, 18 are personnel or procedure related such as removal of toasters, coffee pots, microwaves, & other cooking equipment from the class rooms, clean the cooking hood in the kitchen, remove combustible storage from stairwells, remove interferences from self-closing doors, removing locked chains from exit gates, etc. These are easily fixed and should have been completed within a couple of weeks.

The next 30 items are maintenance related such as, install fire extinguisher sign on fire extinguishers, label sprinkler valve room doors, replace missing ceiling tiles, replace missing switch cover, label classroom doors, provide fire dept with various room keys, repair fire alarm lights, repair smoke detectors hanging from ceiling, maintain dirty smoke detector, take flammable storage out of the boiler room. The ease of fixing these items is obvious; let’s say a month to correct all issues.

The last 16 items are the only items with any mentionable cost to them. Everything else shouldn’t cost $20,000! These items are things like, adding fire horn & strobe lights to the locker rooms, install GFI grounded plugs in 7 places, provide fire rated doors, install exits signs where exits are actually located, replace stage temporary wiring, ventilate flammable materials, exit access from a specific room, extend sprinkler section in lower part of the building. These issues would take a little time to correct, perhaps several months. The cost of these fixes should be in the low, $100s of thousands range at the most.

Okay, so now we have a list of safety issues at the Middle School, and the community is divided on what to do next. We are told that we need to build a new school and a bond is rushed before us for a million bucks. After closer examination, it is fortunate that the warrant article was voted down. We now know that the cost of making KMS safe for years to come is considerably less than a million dollars (much less than the cost of the plans for a new school). It is amazing that the school board could work so quickly to get a bond vote before the public, but was unable get safety issues identified all the way back in 2000 resolved in a school with more than 600 kids in it. Are these items even fixed yet?

The most troubling aspect of all of this is that most of the items on the Nov. 2007 fire inspection have been on annual fire inspection reports dating back to July 27, 2000 in a report issued to Mr. Robert Parent Director of Buildings & Facilities with a copy to the Middle School Principal, & Superintendent McCormack. In fact, I’m sure the violations were noted before that, but I only went back to the year 2000!

Here’s the next step. We appear to have more of a personnel issue than a facility issue. Someone ought to ask why the principal & building & facilities director haven’t done anything about this. Where was that KMS safety committee anyway that was identified in the Sentinel for their good work the other day? Someone ought to ask the board to explain why they haven’t fixed these problems. The public should review all information coming from this board with a jaded eye, as this Middle School failure leaves one to wonder, “Are they being honest? Are they telling the truth? Do they even know the truth? What else don’t we know about our schools?”

The Middle School is but one failure, but a big, expensive, and dangerous one. I hope this helps bring this issue toward resolution. There is plenty of time to have that building 100% repaired prior to this fall. Fix the school!

A final point to consider, if the KMS auditorium was safe in February of this year, how did it become unsafe by a vote in March on a bond for another school? A new school vote would have changed nothing for at least three years. The questions of credibility go beyond the School District & extend to the Fire Dept. Is safety actually based on safety or is based on political events?

There are a few more issues to be brought forward that I never would have known about without my time on the board. I will bring them public during the next year or so.

Thank you for your time tonight.

Please add this to the minutes of this meeting, June 10th, 2008

Robert McLaughlin
Former School Board Member
2 Walker St. Keene NH