San Diego Unified School District Central Elementary School

The San Diego Unified School District (SDUSD) is providing needed upgrades and improvements to school facilities and learning environments as part of the $11.5 billion-dollar Facilities Bond Program, including Proposition S, Proposition Z, Measure YY, and Measure U. To help with this, the District selected Harris to provide staff augmentation support services and construction management for Central Elementary School from 2018 to opening in 2023. Located in the diverse, culturally rich neighborhood of City Heights, this effort provides the community with modern learning facilities that will benefit the lives of residents.

Core Elements

This $84 million Lease/Lease Back project consisted of ten new buildings that include general purpose, special education, and prekindergarten/ kindergarten classrooms. These buildings also house facilities for administration, health center, community clinic, learning commons, daycare, food service, maintenance/support, as well as PE play courts a multipurpose area. As part of the project, the adjacent offsite features were also improved, including a roundabout for traffic calming, new traffic signals, and a new drop-off area for the campus.

Unexpected Challenges

During the demolition and abatement phase the team faced an unexpected challenge, hazardous fireproofing material was discovered throughout multiple locations of the existing campus. To address this, the team launched multiple special exploratory investigation efforts to identify and confirm all hazardous locations and determine the best options to minimize costs and impact to the schedule. Based on the findings, the Harris team developed a plan to proceed with addressing the unforeseen issue in sections to minimize the overall time and costs.

Community Involvement

To minimize the impacts on both vehicles and pedestrians during the installation of the new roundabout and traffic signals as part of the project's offsite construction, our team led multiple coordination meetings with SDG&E, AT&T, the City of San Diego, and surrounding community organizations. The goal was to ensure that the construction of the new school campus is complete and ready for the new school year of 2023/2024.

Beyond the Blueprints

To provide SDUSD with the benefit of lower material costs and more efficient construction management services, Harris grouped scopes of work on this campus together. Our team recommended packaging a new joint-use field as part of the contract allowing all remaining construction to complete without additional phasing, saving time and general conditions money for the District.