School district capital improvements By MARY POSANI Wednesday August 20, 2014 3:46 PM

Summer capital improvement jobs across the Westerville City School District were completed on time and under budget, district officials report.

The district budgeted $4.5 million of work this summer to fix and update facilities. Though contractors are still closing out projects, district Facilities and Operations Director Jeff LeRose said the projects were completed for less than estimated.

Construction crews quickly worked in 10 weeks to complete all projects by deadline, which was prior to teachers returning to the buildings Aug. 11.

"On time and under budget are a great places to be," LeRose said.

Students are back in the buildings, but final finishing touches still need to be completed. District staff will evaluate the work and create a checklist for contractors, who have 30 days to finish the work prior to final payments.

At that point, LeRose said he will have a final tally of how much all the work cost, but preliminary reports say the district is simply "under budget."

Projects at Westerville South High School finished very close to deadline, but were completed enough to allow occupancy in the building. One caveat: South was to receive new windows this summer, but the windows have yet to be delivered.

Temporary glass windows were installed until the new ones arrive. LeRose expects the new windows to come mid-September.

South also underwent kitchen updates that included new counters and food service equipment. The new equipment arrived later than scheduled, causing crews to work over the weekend to get everything set up before school started.

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Big slate of summer work 'on time, under budget'

A lot has changed over the years at 210 S. Lexington Ave. in Wilmore. A school that once housed all of the citys students from youngest to oldest has seen buildings, names and student populations come and go over eight decades. The campus has once again housed students of all different ages at separate times recently as it transitioned from Wilmore Elementary School to Jessamine Early Learning Village to The Providence School.

The things that have stayed the same are marks of pride for the city: The site has always been home to students right in the heart of the community, and the buildings in use today contain the same hallways many walked through 50, 60 or 70 years ago. But with history comes a price, and that price for The Providence School has been a fair share of maintenance issues in the old buildings for students and staff to sweat through recently.

The school district has patched problems in the school as theyve come up, but with a new facilities plan on the horizon, the age and condition of the Providence building could put it right at the top of the list for major renovation projects in the coming years.

Providence, which is the districts alternative middle and high school and houses about 150 students, opened in 2002 at a building on Computrex Drive in north Nicholasville. When the Jessamine Early Learning Village moved from the campus on SouthLexington Avenue in Wilmore to the old East Jessamine Middle School in 2010, the administration announced that Providence would move to the old JELV building in less than a year.

Part of that building on South Lexington Avenue is the oldest school still in use in Jessamine County. The stone structure on the south side, called the Roberts Wing, used to be one of three stone buildings in a U shape to make up the Wilmore School. The Roberts Wing was built in 1938, according to district records, with the current building completed with additions in 1960 and 1972 and some renovation work performed in 1987 and 2007. The next-oldest structure still in use as a public school in Jessamine County is the oldest part of Nicholasville Elementary School, which was constructed in 1943. That school underwent a comprehensive renovation during the 2012-2013 school year.

Providence principal Denise Adams, who opened the school in 2002 and oversaw the move to Wilmore, said it was clear the old buildings would need a renovation in terms of ventilation and electrical systems. Adams retired in July; her successor, Charlanne Pook, said the breaker boxes are full and cant accommodate any additional technology.

Its just hard to run a 21st-century school in a building that was designed and built in the 60s and 70s, Adams said. Its difficult.

Around the same time that Providences move was announced, the districts facilities plan which dictates construction priorities for the next four years or so was being developed. That plan came to the board for approval in January 2011, five months after the announcement that Providence would move.

But the plan only had one item related to the Providence building in Wilmore: some work on a science classroom as well as selected renovation for a change in student population. That item was last on the priority list.

Now in charge of the facilities as chief operating officer for the district, Val Gallutia was principal at Warner Elementary School four years ago and served on the team that developed the 2010 plan. Gallutia said the major construction projects of the new Red Oak Elementary School and comprehensive renovations to Nicholasville and Warner were the top priorities and that the unexpected move of Providence came along late in the months-long process of developing the plan. The old building in Wilmore had sat empty for a year, and administrators had signaled that it could have been sold.

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The Providence School wrestles with temperature, maintenance issues in old buildings as staff hope for full-scale ...

Ravti co-founder Alex Rangel walked into TechCrunch with a stack of crumpled yellow slipsin his hand. This is what the Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning industry still looks like, he said, showing me a stack of papers with unintelligible scrawl.

But Rangel and his co-founder Chris Ginter want to make managing HVAC units easier for property owners by marking equipment with digital tags. Property owners who use these tags will be able to use Ravti to manage all of their units and easily dispatch their preferred vendors to them when they are in need of repairs, without remembering complicated unitcodes.

So far the company has tagged equipment for 30 million square feet of real estate, and they have agreements with a national portfolio manager.

Rangel compared Ravti to software solutions like KAYAK. Just like travelers can use KAYAKto find the best rates for travel plans, building managers can use Ravti to save money and better manage their HVAC repairs.

Ravti starts out by taking pictures of each unit and tagging it with a digital barcode. Owners can then easily select units and dispatcha repair vendorwith the click of a button. The digital inventory of their HVAC units is cloud-based and secure.

And thats no small feat. Rangel tells me HVAC maintenanceaccounts for about 32 percent of the average facilitys budget. He says Ravti can save owners anywhere from 18 to 40 percent on a HVAC replacement because it allows them to buy units in bulk directly from vendors, rather than at marked up prices.

Every building needs it, Rangelsaid.

When Ravti tags a unit, it also gives it a condition score. Rangel says in phase two of Ravti, they hope to implement that informationthey gather about machines conditions to make them more energy-efficient. Ravti is already LEED certified by theUnited States Green Building Council.

Ravti charges property owners for the service by the square footage of the building. Throughout the summer, Ravti has been focused on unit replacements and day-to-day service calls.

Rangelsaid he entered Y Combinator somewhat skeptically as a company in enterprise sales, but he said the experience has surpassed every expectation. He also said working with so many entrepreneurs building consumer-facing apps has helped him enhance the Ravti software.

Link:
YC-Backed Ravti Wants To Digitize The HVAC Industry

RICHMOND, Va. (WRIC) - Just 15 days before students head back to class, Richmond Mayor Dwight Jones is responding to a new report that finds the city's public schools need at least $35 million in repairs.

School leaders say major maintenance projects like replacing HVAC systems and crumbling buildings can't wait any longer.

"I've got grandmothers calling me begging that their grandchild doesn't get put in a basement because they have asthma and we have mold issues," says School Board member, Kim Gray.

"We have sewage issues, we have HVAC and boiler issues that we have to address right now," says Gray.

But Mayor Dwight Jones says -- while repairs are needed -- performance, enrollment, graduation and dropout rates also need to be part of the discussion when it comes to improving education.

"I agree that we need proper facilities to educate our children, and every maintenance request we have received from richmond public schools has been fully funded," says Mayor Jones.

"It's imperative that we undertake the due diligence to ensure that the money we do have and the money that we will seek is invested wisely," says Jones.

Earlier this month, the school board got a presentation about what needs to be fixed after administrators spent months inspecting every school and building.

The biggest problem they found were those failing HVAC systems. Repairs and replacements for those alone are slated at $20 million.

Another $7.5 million is needed for roofs and more than $4 million are needed for basic life, health and safety improvements.

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Richmond Mayor Responds to Public School's Repair Report

Editors note: this article is part of a series exploring the role of networking in the Internet of Things.

Three types of networking topologies are utilized in the Internet-of-Things: point-to-point, star, and mesh networking. To provide a way to explore the attributes and capabilities of each of these topologies, we defined a hypothetical (but realistic) application in the building monitoring and energy management space and methodically defined its networking requirements.

Lets pull it all together to make a network selection for our building monitoring application. As described previously, the application will monitor, analyze, and optimize energy usage throughout the users properties. To accomplish this, monitoring and control points need to be deployed throughout each building, including occupancy and temperature sensors. Sensor data will be aggregated back to a central building automation panel located in each building. A continuous collection of data will provide a higher resolution of temperature and occupancy information, thus rendering better insight into HVAC performance and building utilization patterns. Comparison of energy utilization throughout the portfolio of properties allows lower performing buildings to be flagged.

The networking requirements for this application are summarized in Table 1.

The attributes and capabilities of each of our three network topologies are summarized in Table 2.

We now have the information we need to assess which topology best fits our application requirements. From our review we can see that all three topologies have adequate reliability, interoperability, component availability, and cost. However, the first four attributes in each table range, power consumption, scalability, and bandwidth address the core requirements of the application. These four attributes are quite different for each topology. Within this series, the following points were made regarding these networking options:

Our best networking topology choice is therefore a Zigbee mesh networking architecture. The Zigbee standard, as mentioned earlier, has been designed for low power, low data rate networks and has been widely used in residential, building, and industrial automation/control applications.

The Internet of Things is in its early stages of development. Networking architectures, protocols, and standards are continuing to evolve on both broad (horizontal) and industry-specific (vertical) fronts.

6LoWPAN is one noteworthy emerging standard that has been designed to allow Internet Protocol data, specifically IPv6 packets, to be sent and received over low-power, low data rate 802.15.4-based mesh networks the same networks on which the ZigBee protocol operates. A gateway device converts the IPv6 packets into the 6LoWPAN message structure and then back again to IPv6 so that a Wi-Fi device can receive them. Even with the required packet conversion, the 6LoWPAN protocol promises to provide a much tighter integration between 802.11 IP-based Wi-Fi networks and mesh networks designed for small form factor device (thing) networking.

Originally posted here:
How to identify a scalable IoT network topology

Holy moly.

Thats what teacher Jan Cline and her colleagues said when they reached the third floor of Broadwater Elementary Tuesday afternoon.

They were among the 100 or so parents, children and district staff who toured the renovations in progress at Broadwater and McKinley schools Tuesday.

A year from now, expansions and retrofits designed to bring the historic schools into the 21st century will be complete. But the groundwork has been laid this summer, and contractors and school officials were excited to show it off.

Much of the work so far has been to the schools guts think HVAC systems and window replacements, SD2 bond project manager Lew Anderson told the groups assembled at each site.

Other improvements are in plain sight.

Cline, for instance, could see for the first time her classroom on the opposite end of the third floor at Broadwater. There, Hardy Construction crews have knocked out a small room dubbed the cloffice by school staff, yielding a spacious foyer instead of mazelike corridors.

To see that gone made me kind of emotional, Cline, a 5th grade teacher, said.

Theres much left to do at Broadwater. Concrete footings to the schools east offer just an outline of the large expansion thats to come and will provide space for the gymnasium, cafeteria and offices, according to principal Joe Halligan. Once thats finished, the annex building to the west will be demolished.

When you look in the classrooms, youll have to use your imagination, Anderson told attendees at McKinley. Classrooms in both schools, for the most part, havent been touched yet.

Read the original here:
Parents, teachers glimpse ongoing transformation of historic elementaries

Consumer Reports, like Edmunds, plunked down the coin for a new Model S to get the full ownership experience. And like Edmunds, CR's Tesla has suffered from a range of minor issues that continue to illustrate that the devil is in the details.

Since taking delivery of its Model S, Consumer Reports has racked up nearly 16,000 miles at the hands of testers and staffers, and they're still singing the Tesla's praises. But that enthusiasm is beginning to wane after the retractable door handles failed to deploy, one of the third row buckles broke, the front trunk lid wouldn't open, and the center screen which controls damn near everything went blank.

The door handle situation was handled with an over-the-air update, while the buckle and trunk lid were replaced under warranty. A "hard reset" was necessary to bring the screen back to life, and while it was in for service, the shop "fixed a creak emanating from the passenger side roof-pillar area, disassembling and refitting some trim panels."

But what's more interesting about CR's experience is the number of voluntary fixes Tesla is doing while the car is in for service. It replaced the "front bumper carrier hardware", along with the 12-volt battery, the coolant pump that keeps the battery pack chilled, and the HVAC filter housing. Since CR's car apparently didn't suffer from any issues with these assorted bits, it seems that Tesla knew of issues ahead of time and took proactive measures. And it's nothing compared to the laundry list of issues Edmunds dealt with including three drivetrain replacements during it's long-term Tesla test.

CR is quick to point out that the service experience has been top-notch, with Tesla picking up the car and providing a loaner (CR declines, since it has a fleet). And while its car is a sample size of one, last year's auto-reliability survey based on consumer experience pegged Tesla as "average". We'll see if that changes when CR's next study comes out this fall.

Photo: Consumer Reports

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Consumer Reports Having Issues With Its Tesla Model S, Too

From renovated buildings to new educational programs, students at many Allen County public schools will notice big changes this school year.

Fort Wayne Community Schools is undergoing major renovations at several schools, while East Allen County Schools has closed two buildings. More computer laptops will be available for students at Southwest Allen County Schools. And students at many buildings, including some at Northwest Allen County Schools, will be getting used to new principals.

While changes differ from district to district, everyone will have to adjust to changes in state educational standards approved in April. NACS, for example, has special teams working to align curriculum to the new standards. Teachers will then learn the new curriculum, Superintendent Chris Himsel said.

Unfortunately, because of the timeline that has been mandated and the lack of funding or resources provided to make the implementation happen, nearly all of this work will result because of teachers volunteering their time because they are committed to our students, Himsel said in an email.

Here are some of the major changes:

EACS

Students will attend newly expanded and renovated Heritage and Woodlan campuses, both of which will house students in kindergarten through 12th grade. EACS officials will decide whether to sell the former Heritage Elementary and Woodlan Primary schools, which closed last spring.

SACS

By adding grades 3 through 5 to the list, students in grades 3 to 12 will be issued laptops.

In addition, students and parents are cautioned about road work near the schools. Thats going to impact traffic in the morning going to school, Superintendent Philip Downs said.

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Change afoot at several schools in the county

Lima City Council will hold its first regular meeting of August Monday night with a full agenda facing the legislative body.

Council will be asked to accept a Safe Neighborhood Anti-Heroin Grant from the Attorney Generals Office. The grant will reimburse the Police Department for two patrol officers salaries, for two years.

Council will receive a communication from Ohio State University in Columbus about capital projects the University wants to do at it's Lima Regional Campus. The plan is to resurface roads and parking lots, do HVAC repairs and replacements, and upgrade campus security. This will cost nearly $1.7 million.

Council will vote on a number of ordinances related to the new Stadium Park planned for property located next to the newly named Spartan Stadium. Council will have to amend a number of ordinances since they all refer to 'Lima Stadium', which no longer exists. The ordinances will accept donations of property, finalize property deals and okay the use of state capital improvement money to build the park.

And finally, council will enter into a nearly $900,000 contract with Bluffton Paving to complete various paving projects in the city.

The meeting begins at 7 Monday night in Council Chambers at the Lima Municipal Center.

Continue reading here:
This Week in Lima City Council

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HVAC Replacement