With a new school year on the horizon, the Rochester City School District is preparing to undergo significant changes in some buildings as part of a Facilities Modernization Plan.
The district is entering the third phase of its school modernization program which started more than a decade ago. In this round of renovations, six school buildings will be upgraded to the tune of $475 million.
“It provides a very unique amount of money into this community and into this school district,” former Rochester Mayor Tom Richards, chair of the Rochester Joint Schools Construction Board (RJSCB) said during a school board meeting Tuesday. RJSCB oversees the modernization program.
“Those of you who have had a chance to go into the schools that have been modernized, it really is a different feel to it,” Richards said. “There's no reason why our kids shouldn't have that kind of impression, and that kind of facility, just as much as some kid who lives in Victor.”
The most expensive project, with a projected cost of $140.7 million, is at Franklin Campus which will house the new Padilla High School.
The building is massive and is about a century old. Richards said it will require a major overhaul to install things like air conditioning and security upgrades.
"One of the significant parts of the modernization project is to improve the safety context with respect to the schools physically — entrance ways, ability to control coming and going, which are often difficult in older schools which never had that in mind," he said.
Construction at the Franklin campus is expected to start in 2026, at which point students will be moved to a “swing space” at Marshall High School for the duration of construction, which is expected to last until 2029.
That could add another layer of change in an already complex situation for students, especially middle schoolers who are affected by a reconfiguration plan that takes effect this year.
“The reasoning of the reconfiguration was to separate the middle school and the high school due to cultural issues,” said school board member Isaiah Santiago. “I'm seeing that in some of the swing spaces, that there may be possibilities of us going back to a place where we're mixing the middle schools and high schools together.”
That would be the case for the Fredrick Douglass Campus where middle schoolers would be moved to a swing space at Charlotte High School starting in 2026. Similar to Franklin, The Douglass Campus plans include security upgrades and fundamental changes to infrastructure. However, the price tag is about 40% lower with an estimated cost of $81 million.
Richards warned that labor shortages, increased construction costs, and other factors could delay or complicate the rollout of this upcoming phase of the modernization plan.
"We've got to line up with the school year and we're moving, in some cases, populations of students ... into other spaces while we do the work,” Richards said. “That means if you slide the schedule and you miss one of those dates, you can miss a whole school year.”
