Wren Abbott
This amphitheater inside one of Agua Fria Elementary School's buildings is one of the structures that will be demolished if the plan to rebuild the school goes forward.
A meeting Tuesday evening will explore possible options for the beleaguered Agua Fria Elementary School construction project, which has thus far been beset with numerous delays and obstacles.---
Santa Fe Public Schools and Santa Fe County are holding the meeting jointly at the Nancy Rodriguez Community Center in Agua Fria Village (at 1 Prairie Dog Loop) beginning at 6 pm tomorrow, Tuesday, Nov. 29.
Representatives from SFPS and the county, as well as interested community members, will be speaking at the meeting, which will explore the possibility of rebuilding the school on land near the Nancy Rodriguez center itself.
Originally, the school was to be renovated, not completely rebuilt, but Albuquerque architect Claudio Vigil proposed a complete teardown in his winning proposal to get the contract. Vigil intended to tear down buildings built as recently as 2005, which SFPS staff said had problems with the heating and cooling and alarm systems, rather than structural issues. At least one member of the school board was sold on the notion of a rebuild partly on the belief there was a mold problem at the school, an assertion SFR later showed to be faulty.
Despite the lingering questions over the necessity of a rebuild, protests by Agua Fria Village residents who believed a historic 1930's-era adobe building at the site shouldn't be torn down, and concerns about how the construction project would affect the neighborhood, the project got the go-ahead. But when contractors provided SFPS with estimates for completing the work, they vastly exceeded Vigil's estimates—which already represented a big increase over the expected cost of renovation only. That snafu created an opportunity for the SFPS Board of Education to consider rebuilding the school, but on a different piece of land, eliminating at least one problem - the disruption and additional expense of rebuilding around an operating elementary school.
