The official groundbreaking for the new Hill School on Park Avenue is only a few weeks away and so is the start of the construction budget.
As anyone who has ever done a building project, overruns are to be expected. And in the case of a $50 million project, one can only have nightmares of the potential overruns that could add up to millions of dollars.
However, this has not been the case with the new Revere public schools. In the last decade Revere has built four new schools totaling more than $100 million provided by state and local sources. These projects have just about all been delivered on time and on budget.
This is quite a feat for any single construction project not to mention four.
The recognition goes to Dr. Paul Dakin and his team who seem to have mastered keeping the construction costs under control and potential impact logistics to parents and students down to a minimum.
In addition to budgetry concerns, there are also quality issues. In the neighboring city of Everett, a new school was built for more than $30 million and was never able to be opened until the air quality issues were remedied that resulted in hundreds of thousands of dollars above the budget.
Again in Revere, this has not happened. The new schools that have been built are heavily used and are in as good a physical shape today as the day that the doors were open to the students and teachers.
Dakin and his team have made the Revere public schools system’s education the envy of their peers in the surrounding communities. Likewise, his oversight and the end product of the new schools should be the envy of every Revere homeowner who has done a construction budget.
Revere taxpayers and children have been served well by Dakin and his team.
We should all be able to sleep a little sounder at night, knowing that the new Hill School construction project should end up as well as the Rumney Marsh Academy, Susan B. Anthony, Paul Revere and Whelan Schools