The Rochester City School District is moving forward with several multi-million-dollar summer construction projects.
New playgrounds at Schools 19 and 28, new pool equipment at Loretta Johnson and Thurgood Marshall middle schools, and several roofing and solar panel projects are part of what the district anticipates will be a busy construction season.
In total, it amounts to $27 million in renovations at 15 schools, according to district records.
Some of the projects are carryovers that were delayed due to labor shortages, said Jacob Scott, chief of operations at the district, speaking during a recent Board of Education meeting.
“Construction progress is always subject, of course, to outside factors such as labor availability,” Scott said. “As you know, the new stadium for the Buffalo Bills, hopefully, is almost finished, but that also did put a dent on the labor here in Rochester.”
The summer work is something of a warm-up to the $600 million in remodeling and renovation work expected to begin during the next school year as part of the school modernization program.
“There's six schools in a phase three (of the larger, school modernization project),” said Thomas Richards, chairman of the Rochester Joint Schools Construction Board. “At least three of those will continue to operate in place. They'll be disrupted a little bit, because we have to cordon off a place where we're working, and you know ... if we're to work in those buildings, we need to do quite a bit of preparation.”
State preliminary design of all six projects is underway involving plans for the School 9 elementary school, Frederick Douglass middle school, and the Wilson Commencement, East, Edison Career & Tech and Padilla (formerly Franklin) high schools. East already has seen considerable work, and has the least investment in this next phase, while Padilla will see the most.
“The preliminary design step turned out to be an addition, it wasn't part of what we originally worked on,” Richards said. “But (state education officials) wanted it, and it worked better for them when they look at all the projects together. My hope is that, down the road, actually, it will bear fruit, because we'll start with a more common understanding here of what's allowable, and what isn't, and so the later phases of this thing should go quicker. But it certainly has not gone quick to date.”
The high schools will remain in place during the construction, while the district is still evaluating whether to relocate School 9 students into temporary space.
But none of the work is likely to start until the latter half of the 2026-27 school year.
In total, the city’s school modernization project will cost more than $1 billion, and represents one of the largest — if not the largest — public works projects in Rochester’s history.
