Oak Park and River Forest High School is looking to create a new construction supervisor position to manage the school’s construction projects.
The school’s construction projects typically range more than a million dollars each year. Tod Altenburg, OPRF’s chief financial officer, says the new post will create annual savings in the budget.
The school incurs annual architect and engineering (A&E) fees from outside construction management firms, and having a person on staff, with full salary and benefits, will cut down those costs, Altenburg said. This position would not be an administrator, he stressed.
The construction supervisor’s starting salary for the 2016-2017 school year would be roughly $135,000, including benefits. Altenburg estimates that A&E fees that year would run about $281,000. Factoring in an annual salary increase of 2.5 percent, which is the same for most other support staff, OPRF would still incur savings from the new post, Altenburg said.
Under that scenario, by 2020, the construction supervisor would earn roughly $149,000, while A&E fees are projected that year at roughly $275,000, according to the school’s budget figures.
“We would like to shift away from [management firms] and develop, institute or create a supervisor that would be our employee, and would be representing us at meetings with the architects in the various stages of projects,” Altenburg said.
According to the school budget figures, OPRF will save roughly $1.2 million between 2016 and 2021 with the new position, Altenburg said.
While the school’s architectural firm, Legat Architects, focuses on designing projects, the supervisor would schedule them and make sure they’re completed on time and properly, said Robert Zummallen, OPRF’s director of buildings and grounds.
“[The supervisor] would also act as a liaison between the contractors and school district for all the finances that has to be paid out by contract,” Zummallen said.
Niles Township High School District 219 and Naperville District 203 are among the neighboring school districts that have such a post, Zummallen said.
The post was discussed Aug. 19, by the District 200 Finance Committee. Finance committee member Ralph Lee credited administration for savings costs while also creating a new position.
“We get criticized for raising expenditures by hiring more administrators, and increasing the number of administrators on staff,” Lee said. “Here, it appears we’re adding another administrator in order to decrease costs, which we’re not accustomed to thinking about in those terms. I doubt that it happens all that often. And I can see us getting criticized for this, simply because people were not aware of what we were paying in the first place to construction firms.”
In response, Altenburg clarified that the construction supervisor was not a new position within the administration. The supervisor, Altenburg said, will report directly to him and have no administrative responsibilities.
The finance committee agreed to move this item to the full school board for further discussion.