School board approves big bucks for several expenditures

FRONT ROYAL — The Warren County School Board on Sept. 4 unanimously approved tens of thousands of dollars to cover several contract expenditures.

Overall, the board awarded a $75,564 copier lease for equipment and services at Skyline Middle School; $26,276 worth of repairs for the local high schools’ tennis courts; and renewed a point of sale (POS) software and hardware package for Food and Nutrition Services at a cost of $20,035.84.

Timothy Grant, technology director for Warren County Public Schools explains copier lease to WCSB. Photo and video by Mark Williams, Royal Examiner.

The School Board members awarded the copier lease contract to Document Solutions Inc., which holds the current contract that expires on Sept. 15.

The copier lease contract was competitively bid through the Association of Education Purchasing Agencies, a national cooperative buying program for schools, governments and nonprofits, according to Timothy Grant, technology director for Warren County Public Schools (WCPS).

Under terms of the lease, the $2,099 monthly payments on the 36-month contract “will come out of Skyline Middle School’s budget,” said Grant, who later told the Royal Examiner that the contract also includes maintenance.

Grant explained that a lease is more cost effective than if the school purchased copiers outright because the associated “maintenance costs are too high and they’re always failing” due to constant use.

“We just don’t have enough staff to repair the copiers on a regular basis,” he told the Royal Examiner, adding that WCPS is “now encouraging staff to use copiers more than their printers because printer ink is so expensive.”

School Board members also voted to award a $26,276 contract to ATC Corp. for repairs to the tennis courts at Skyline High School and Warren County High School.

“These repairs will greatly reduce water infiltration that could possibly cause further cracking and maintain the courts in a safe and playable manner,” said Greg Livesay, WCPS director of maintenance, during last night’s School Board meeting.

As the board recommended during its July 3 meeting, Livesay said that staff on July 17 met with WDP and Associates, a geotechnical consultancy, to review the WCPS construction plans and previous repairs, and to conduct site visits to both high schools to determine if any subsidence or movement of the soils were possibly causing the extensive cracking at the tennis courts.

Greg Livesay, WCPS director of maintenance.

However, the firm said the problem is simply age-related asphalt deterioration that’s typical for older tennis courts, Livesay said, adding that he then had a detailed conversation with ATC Corp. about how to reduce the scope and the costs for the tennis court repairs.

“As you know,” Livesay told board members, “we had over $65,000 in costs for the previous suggested repairs. And that would put a huge impact on our maintenance and repair budget — roughly 25 percent of it.”

Therefore, Livesay recommended removing the originally proposed crack repair overlay system — which he said accounted for the largest financial chunk of the proposed project — and instead perform what’s called a crack fill leveling and then repaint the repair areas. The decreased scope of the project would thereby lessen the overall costs, he said.

“I don’t want to call this a stop gap” measure to stem the problems, added Livesay, “but we are going to have to continue to do repairs like this until the courts are resurfaced.”

School Board members approved the ATC Corp. contract, which reduced repairs at Warren County High School to $12,022 from $25,877 and at Skyline High School from $32,925 down to $14,254.

In other action, the School Board approved an expenditure over $15,000 by WCPS Food and Nutrition Services to renew a POS software and hardware support package from Data Business Systems Inc.

“This system is used in all our cafeterias,” said Melody Sheppard, assistant superintendent for administration at WCPS, who explained that the POS package automates sales activity, meal and eligibility counts, and provides data for state and federal reports.

The program also processes cafeteria sales, tracks items sold, generates reports, and provides information on purchased meals, she said.

Additionally, “the system allows parents to put money on students’ lunch accounts through a secure internet connection and parents are able to monitor what their child has purchased for breakfast or lunch using the online portion of the program,” added Sheppard.

The cost and financing will come directly out of the budget for Food and Nutrition Services.

To view other actions and comments made during the Warren County School Board’s Sept. 4 regular meeting, watch the video taken by the Royal Examiner.