Costly new campus planned for Rickards Middle after roof collapse

James S. Rickards Middle in Oakland Park will get a new portable campus and eventually a permanent replacement after Broward school officials determined that a March 5 roof collapse left the main building a total loss.

The price tag is steep — about $80 million for temporary and permanent fixes to the campus for a school district already a half-billion dollars over budget in its school construction program.

But the need is great, School Board members say, given the trauma students and staff went through when the roof collapsed in the middle of the school day on March 5. The board approved the full project during meetings Tuesday and Thursday.

The project includes $8 million for temporary modular classrooms until the project is complete. The district could have saved that cost by reassigning students to other schools until 2024, when the new building is expected to be complete

“This isn’t a financial decision. These aren’t business offices or industrial warehouses. These are classrooms for children,” board member Donna Korn said. “Because of COVID, we have seen how desperate our children are to be in school together in their school community with their friends.”

Students will be inconvenienced initially. The portable campus, which consists of about 30 buildings, won’t be ready until late 2021. So students will start the year elsewhere.

There’s not one campus nearby with enough room to house all 950 Rickards students, district officials said.

So sixth graders will start out at William Dandy Middle in Fort Lauderdale for the first few weeks of school and then move into two existing buildings on the Rickards campus that were not destroyed. The district still needs to make some repairs and get permits to reopen them, but that should be done by late September, construction manager Frank Girardi said.

Seventh graders will spend the full first semester at Lauderdale Lakes Middle, while eighth graders will be on the campus of nearby Northeast High in Oakland Park.

Then in January 2022, all students are expected to attend school in the new portable campus.

Board members initially balked at spending $8 million for a temporary campus, but they were flooded with dozens of emails from Rickards parents and teachers and Oakland Park city officials and residents.

Niña Solorzano, who has sixth and seventh grade children at Rickards, wrote to School Board members that she may be forced to withdraw her kids if they have to attend different schools.

“For my option to be that both of my kids will end up split into two separate schools for the next 3 years is ludicrous,” Solorzano wrote. “The option with portables being built in my opinion is best. Why should our children, staff, and their families have to be inconvenienced because of a situation that was out of everyone’s control.”

Board member Sarah Leonardi, who represents the school, emailed her back Friday saying the campus was getting temporary and permanent facilities.

“That is a huge and rare investment and the community truly deserves it,” Leonardi wrote.

Rickards was already under construction and had a new roof when the roof collapsed. No one was seriously injured, but students and teachers described climbing over rubble to safety and several were taken to the hospital for issues such as asthma and anxiety.

An engineering review conducted in April blamed the collapse on the failures of bolts used to connect L-shaped brackets from the wall to the roof joists.

The temporary campus will be similar to one placed on a campus that experienced an even greater trauma, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High, where the Feb. 14, 2018, mass shooting forced the closure of a school building.

The Stoneman Douglas portable campus wasn’t expected to be open until the middle of the fall semester of 2018, but district officials rushed it to get it open for the start of school in August. Students stayed there until a replacement building opened in the fall of 2020.

That pace was unusual for the district, which has been plagued by construction delays.

Board Chairwoman Rosalind Osgood said she hopes to see that same fast pace for Rickards.

“In this district, we have a way we move. But with MSD, we moved differently and moved a lot quicker,” she said.

Girardi, who was responsible for the Stoneman Douglas project, said, “It’s my plan to bring this project in ahead of schedule.”

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