Bethel School District recently passed a bond for Cascade Middle School. It is similar to the Silverton Middle School project in many ways, both in phasing strategy and costs. Wenaha Group, who is assisting the District with pre-bond activities, looked at Cascade MS as a comparison. Some details of that comparison are below.

Strategy

• It is common when replacing a school to build the new building on the same site adjacent to the old building, move the staff/students into the new building, and then demo the old building. This is considered the most cost effective way of constructing a new school building, if you have the room on the property. Fortunately SMS does have enough room for this strategy.
  • This strategy is exactly what Bethel SD did at Cascade MS. They built a new building adjacent to their old building and kept their music room addition, then demo’d the old building. You can see that in their design reveal video here around 8 minutes in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=la7slegPZUE&t=42s.

• The other cost-saving decision we are employing at SMS is to keep the existing gym and locker room buildings and do a light remodel of those areas. They are in good condition compared to the other Middle School buildings. The gym/locker room received a recent grant-funded seismic upgrade and that grant funding stipulates that the District keep the gym/locker room operational. That’s money the District saves by not building new. By keeping new construction contained on one side of the site at a time, we can easily secure the construction site and minimize disruptions to staff and students. This is common on school construction projects.

• It’s hard to tell from Bethel’s website their exact construction schedule, but our guess is it is similar to what we have planned for SMS, especially when Bethel is using an experienced school builder like Todd Construction. The SMS construction schedule is planned for 27 months from May 2025-August 2027, but that is inclusive of the new building, renovation of existing gym, the site work, and the demolition of the existing buildings. The construction of the new building is the first 15 months of that schedule so the new building would open in Fall 2026. The rest of the schedule is dedicated toward demo and abatement of the existing buildings and the site work following demo.

• Building a new Middle School on purchased property would be more expensive than the current plan. Additional costs would include the property purchase amount and significantly more road development and utility extensions, depending on the site. Building on new property would likely trigger requirements for traffic impact analysis for road/traffic upgrades. And the District would still be faced with demo or stuck with the old, unusable Middle School campus.
  

Cost

• Wenaha Group analyzed costs on Cascade MS as a comp to make sure our SMS assumptions were on track.
  • To compare Cascade MS financially to Silverton MS we had to escalate their 2021 bid/project costs so that it is apples to apples with the Silverton MS timeline. When Wenaha did this, we learned that Cascade was about $620 per square foot. We evaluated two other comps from Corvallis and West Linn-Wilsonville that were $680-760/SF. Silverton MS’s budget is $655/SF, so that is telling us that we are well in the range of what neighboring communities are doing. All of these comparative numbers necessarily include the “soft costs” which include things like architect and engineering, inspection costs, permits, furnishings, technology equipment, etc.

The Middle School’s $75 million project budget includes:

• Phased construction to occur in 27-month schedule (May 2025-August 2027)
• Demolition and abatement of existing buildings (excluding gymnasium/locker rooms)
• 91,000 SF new construction
• A light remodel of 24,000 SF existing gymnasium/locker rooms
• Reconfiguration of play fields and back-of-house spaces, replacement of tennis courts
• Site work including driveways and parking lots, sidewalks, stormwater, utilities, electrical upgrades, landscaping, etc.
• Architectural, engineering, project management, permit/inspection fees and other associated costs
• Contingency

The Silverton Middle School project budget is roughly $652 per building square foot, inclusive of all items listed above. We have compared this to similar recent school construction projects in the area at Bethel School District, West Linn-Wilsonville School District, and Corvallis School District. All three districts put their projects out to bid in 2021-2022. When their project costs are escalated to a 2025 bid date to match Silver Falls’ target bid date, these schools had project budgets ranging from $620-$760 per square foot. The proposed Silverton Middle School project budget is comparable to recent project costs of our neighboring districts.