If a condo can collapse, are school buildings safe?

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — A stunning condo collapse in Surfside, months after a sudden roof collapse at a Broward middle school, is raising concerns about whether some of Broward County’s school buildings will be safe when students return in the fall.

A newly released report concludes that the failures that led a roof to cave in at James S. Rickards Middle in March are a threat to four other schools.

Nevertheless, administrators plan to reopen those schools after making repairs while proposing that the main building at Rickards be replaced. The district also plans to keep open about three dozen other schools where the state has determined that one or more buildings should be replaced.

In light of Surfside — and facing criticism that they’ve been forgoing structural improvements to save money — administrators say they plan to conduct new inspections of old schools. State law requires inspections at many buildings when they reach 40 years old, but schools are exempt.

“We’re going to be coming up with a plan that once schools hit a certain age, we will look at those schools,” district construction manager Frank Girardi said. “I don’t know what age that would be right now.”

The district plans to “bring recommendations of structural reviews, investigations and inspections to the School Board” by August, according to a statement from the office of Chief Communications Officer Kathy Koch.

The statement also said each project’s architects and engineers are already required to review the conditions of facilities once they take on a school construction project

A 2016 architectural review did not reveal any structural concerns at Rickards, which was built in 1969, even though a school with the same design, Apollo Middle in Hollywood, had a roof collapse in 1979.

Renovations were actually 75% complete at Rickards, and a new roof had been installed when the breach happened during school hours on March 5. The incident frightened the 240 teachers and students on campus, but no one was seriously hurt.

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

“Our work at Rickards has shown that some of the bolts failed in a brittle manner, which is unexpected and inconsistent with the type of material generally used for these bolts,” said the report from Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates, a Fort Lauderdale engineering firm.

Four other schools with the same prototype — Apollo, Lauderdale Lakes Middle, Lauderhill 6-12 and Plantation Middle — could face the same problems if their bolts failed, the report said. The firm found these problems both in the media centers and the locker rooms.

“If a bolt fails for any reason, there is an increased likelihood that additional bolts may fail, potentially resulting in a roof collapse similar to the one observed at Rickards,” said the report, dated April 28.

The report doesn’t mention the 1979 roof collapse at Apollo, which followed a heavy rainstorm. An engineering review at the time blamed that failure on insufficient roof drainage and inadequate roof slope and support.

The district gave Apollo a new roof and installed new concrete columns and steel support girders for all five schools’ roofs, along with drainage equipment to take rainwater off the roofs, the Fort Lauderdale News reported.

The engineering firm reviewing the recent Rickards collapse recommended putting shoring, or props, in place to support the joists at Apollo, Lauderhill, Lauderdale Lakes and Plantation Middle until permanent fixes can be made.

These repairs will happen well before the new school year begins, making the schools safe for students and teachers, said Jeff Moquin, chief of staff for Superintendent Robert Runcie.

“The four schools will all be shored up,” Moquin said. “In fact, we believe there’s a good chance the permanent repairs will be accomplished.”

But Nathalie Lynch-Walsh, chairwoman of the Facilities Task Force, questions how long any repairs will last.

“Given the history of this prototype, I don’t feel confident,” she said. “There’s never going to be a permanent fix until you replace the buildings.”

That’s the plan for Rickards. Moquin said district administrators will ask the School Board on July 20 to demolish and replace the main building. Where students will go is unclear. Temporary modular buildings are planned for the campus, but Moquin said this will likely take six months and might not be ready until winter break.

Until then, students probably will be temporarily placed at other schools, such as nearby Northeast High, William Dandy Middle in Fort Lauderdale and Lauderdale Lakes Middle.

The school district also hopes to get permits needed to reopen two other buildings on the Rickards campus that were not affected by the roof collapse. That could happen before any work begins on the main building, but that’s not an option that science teacher Yulanda Ellis supports.

“I just feel it’s not safe for anyone to be anywhere on the campus while the building is being demolished,” she said.

Rickards parent Muriel Theophin-Atilussaid said none of the options seem good. She said she has concerns about her daughter possibly going to Lauderdale Lakes Middle, a school with the same structural design as Rickards, even though the district said it will be safe by the fall. She also isn’t convinced the temporary campus will be ready during the 2021-22 school year.

“As slow as they work on construction, it is not going to be complete by winter break,” she said. “There’s going to be some kind of excuse. We’re going to have another community meeting where they say we ran into an issue with the permits, so let’s continue for the rest of the year with students on different campuses.”

School replacements, like the one proposed for Rickards, have been rare in Broward in recent years. Neighboring Palm Beach County has regularly replaced 50-year-old campuses over the past two decades. Miami-Dade has been renovating and replacing its buildings.

But only a few building replacements are in Broward’s school construction plan, even though at least three dozen schools have state-approved reports confirming their conditions are poor enough to warrant demolishing and replacing buildings. These include Stranahan High and Parkway Middle in Fort Lauderdale, South Broward High in Hollywood and Nova High in Davie.

The reports don’t say that the buildings are in imminent danger but that it would be more cost-effective to replace rather than repair them.

District officials say they don’t have the money to replace all inferior buildings. They even switched one planned replacement to a renovation without School Board approval in order to stay within budget.

The district told voters in 2014 that it planned to replace C. Robert Markham Elementary in Pompano Beach. In 2017, the building had trees growing out of its roof, resulting in mold and interior decay, so the School Board agreed to expedite the work. That never happened. The project was delayed, and without School Board approval, switched from a replacement to a renovation, despite the objection of Coral Gables-based Carty Architecture.

“The lack of natural light makes for a miserable learning and working environment for the children and staff,’ architect Judy Carty wrote in 2017. “In addition, the extensive water damage has penetrated a large percentage of the school and the presence of mold will require that most of the walls be removed and replaced. The structure was designed to resist less than half of the current wind loading requirements and must be replaced in order not to jeopardize the investment for interior renovations.”

The district decided the project should be a renovation because “replacing the building would require a much greater resource of funding,” according to a January 2018 email from Blake Thorson, a project manager for CBRE Heery, a company that was overseeing the district’s bond program at the time.

After being questioned about this action in public meetings by Lynch-Walsh and School Board member Nora Rupert, who represents the school, the district agreed to conduct a new review of the school’s conditions to see whether it should be replaced. A School Board workshop will be held to discuss the options after the review is complete, a statement from Koch’s office said.

“The District remains steadfast in its strategy of addressing upgrades, whether renovation or replacement, based on the unique needs of each school and the particular conditions of each building,” Koch’s office said. “Each building and project must be evaluated on an individual basis to determine replacement versus repair.”