Flush with $457 million in bond money, Guilford County Schools takes a look at other systems’ construction practices, focusing on Forsyth County’s Reagan High School and Charlotte’s Mallard Creek High School.
Construction practices on those schools might conflict with GCS’ minority contracting policy:
Mallard Creek used pre-cast concrete panels, a system also being used at Eastern. The pre-cast concrete issue highlights the way that the goals of inefficient construction and increasing the percentage of minority and women-owned businesses on a construction project can sometimes conflict.
The schools say pre-cast concrete panels are less expensive than traditional masonry. They are simpler and require less hand detailing than traditional masonry. But Todd Baldwin, the Guilford County Schools minority and women business enterprise coordinator, told the committee that pre-cast panels, which are erected as part of a large contract, are considered bad for minority participation because they can’t be split up into smaller jobs and bid to smaller contractors.
Baldwin said that if you choose pre-cast panels over masonry, or masonry over sheetrock, “you have just disenfranchised an entity.”
Guilford County Schools Chief Operations Officer Leo Bobadilla disagreed with Baldwin, saying the schools can achieve high minority and female participation with any design. Bobadilla said minority participation is achieved by working with the minority contracting community, not by tinkering with school designs.
But here’s the real issue:
The airport area high school, which will hold 1,200 regular students and 48 autistic students in a separate wing, would, at $80 million, cost $64,000 per student, nearly three times as much per student as Mallard Creek.
