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The Aurora school district is working to get projects funded through a $1 billion bond program started by this summer. One of its first steps: Hiring an outside contractor to oversee all the work.
In December, the district signed a contract with Jacobs Project Management for $17 million over the next five years, coming out of the bond. Voters approved the bond — the largest school bond in state history — in 2024.
One of the first things the Jacobs staff is working on with Aurora is the schedule of work for all the bond projects. It is nearly complete, and community members can expect to see work starting soon, said Brett Johnson, the district’s chief financial officer.
Johnson said the district made the decision to outsource the management of the work because of how many large projects will be involved.
Asking the Aurora staff already tasked with managing an assortment of projects to take on an additional billion dollars worth of projects would be a lot, Johnson said.
“Our interest and decision to engage with an owners rep for this is representative of the fact that we also just approved the largest bond package in the history of Colorado schools,” Johnson said.
Among the things the $1 billion bond program will cover is a new high school, a significant rebuild of Gateway High School, rebuilding Laredo Elementary, and construction of two new pre-K-8 buildings.
“What we’re really leaning on them for is to make sure we’re on time and on budget, and having a centralized set of eyes to monitor projects in real time,” Johnson said of the management company.
The contract for Jacobs wasn’t approved individually by the board because it was included as part of the package of bond work the board already approved. Similarly, already approved bond projects won’t need board approval for each contract. But part of Jacobs’ work will also be to review the district’s process for requesting bids and awarding contracts and to recommend any needed changes.
The Aurora school district has closed eight schools in the last five years due to declining enrollment, but always said the district faced the issue of declining student populations in the west, near Denver, while new development meant growing student counts in the east.
The district has already opened a new school in the last few years for new developments toward the northeast part of the district, but the need is expected to keep growing.
Although some of the metro area school districts continue to lose students, the Aurora school district started turning that trend around with enrollment growing for several years. This year, 39,813 students are enrolled in Aurora schools, up from a low of 37,907 in the fall of 2020.
Companies often help school districts with bond projects
Hiring a company to help manage bond projects isn’t unique.
For example, this year, the neighboring Adams 12 school district is also contracting with a firm, Anser Advisory, now under Accenture, for $2.5 million to help manage two of the district’s bond projects: the rebuilding of Thornton High School and the expansion of FutureForward at Bollman, the district’s career and technical education campus. Together, the two projects represent about $260 million, or 31%, of the total $830 million bond.
School districts that apply for state support for building repairs or projects through the BEST grant program are also “strongly encouraged” to hire a project management firm for new schools or major renovations, a spokesperson for the Colorado Department of Education said. It’s fairly common among smaller or rural districts that might not have a lot of staff members available to work on large new projects requiring a lot of attention.
In Aurora, the plan is for the management company to work collaboratively with the district’s internal team that is dedicated to construction projects, Johnson said.
And as in other years, the district will still have oversight from the community through a Citizens Bond Oversight Committee that already started meeting this year.
But having a team of people dedicated just to work on these projects means everything should be monitored more closely, Johnson said.
The school district’s director of construction, Caleb Tobin, submitted his resignation last month and will leave the district soon.
Emails obtained by Chalkbeat show the director has been asking the district to approve new staff to help with the bond since at least October.
In an email written in December and then followed up again in January, Tobin urged the district for more staff, saying there is more work to be done now. He cited non-bond projects, such as those affiliated with the Mill Levy and new facilities being added to the school district
“We have significant needs that, in my opinion, should not be filled by hiring additional expensive contract staff,” he wrote. “We can and should be building our team up for a future APS that has significantly more facilities and projects, and we should do so in a way that is financially and operationally prudent, which in my opinion means hiring long-term APS staff.”
Even if the new positions had to be hired slowly over time, Tobin wrote, it would be positive for the current staff and the whole district.
At least one project manager was approved to start mid-year. District leaders told Tobin to make any other position needs a part of the department’s budget request for the next school year.
The district is planning to set up a website with a map detailing all the bond projects and their status.
Yesenia Robles is a reporter for Chalkbeat Colorado covering K-12 school districts and multilingual education. Contact Yesenia at yrobles@chalkbeat.org.
