What’s in Store for Our Bond Referendum Work
When the Patchogue-Medford School District community approved our bond referendum last May, it was done with the confidence that it would enable the District to bring state-of-the-art climate control technology into all of our classrooms, gymnasiums, and cafeterias in our schools; significantly upgrade our high school athletic facilities; and transform the music and theater sound and lighting systems at our middle schools and high school to professional grade. While we all would like to see work begin tomorrow, the implementation of bond projects is contingent on several factors not entirely in the control of the District. For example, no work can commence before architectural and engineering plans are approved by the New York State Education Department (NYSED). Current experience indicates NYSED’s approval turnaround time can be upwards of 210 days. Following NYSED approval, bids go out and contracts are awarded. However, supply chain issues are still a factor in the construction industry, and depending on the availability of materials needed for our projects, there may be delays in the start dates of some projects. Additionally, work must be done so as not to interrupt student class time or other activities normally scheduled at our schools. This is why the majority of the work needs to be done over the summer, during holiday breaks, and other times students are not in our schools. Having noted all this, assuming all goes as planned, we anticipate being able to commence work on the new turf field at the high school and start the installation of new sound and lighting assets at our secondary schools in July 2025. We anticipate completion of all this work in November 2025.
The big project is the installation of the heating/cooling unit ventilators and related equipment in all our schools. We have broken this down into four phases, with Bay Elementary School and South Ocean Middle School in Phase 1. The reasoning for these two schools coming on board first was that the capital project work will be started at Bay Elementary School in June, and it makes sense to do the heating/cooling installations at the same time. In a similar vein, South Ocean Middle School recently had new unit ventilators installed for the heating component, so it makes sense to complete work at that building by installing the cooling elements during this first phase.
Phase 2 will include Eagle and Tremont elementary schools, with an anticipated start date of January 2026 and completion in time for the 2026-2027 school year. Phase 3 includes Canaan, Medford, Barton, and River elementary schools. The projected start/completion dates for these schools is January 2027/ September 2027. Phase 4 includes our secondary schools, with anticipated start/completion dates of January 2028/September 2028 for the middle schools and January 2028/December 2028 for the high school.
