Job 1: Rebuild public trust
After a controversial year of reviews and reconstruction, an expert who diagnosed problems worries about the wind-worthiness of school repairs.
By BARBARA BEHRENDT and COLLINS CONNER
Published May 8, 2005
HOMOSASSA - It began one year ago with a stack of photographs and a claim published in the Citrus Times that shoddy workmanship could bring down the walls of two new buildings at Homosassa Elementary School.
Within a month of that May 9, 2004, story, tests of the school's new cafeteria and media center found hundreds of defects - hollow walls that should have been full of concrete and steel, heavy beams bolted to thin air, a roof that wasn't attached to the walls, walls that weren't connected to each other.
The enormity of the construction failure spawned a stream of investigations, led to a review by a citizens' committee, forced Homosassa students onto a temporary campus and ate up hundreds of thousands of dollars in consulting fees and repair bills.
In the yearlong struggle to make the buildings right, the School District has grappled with another question: How did its own employees and procedures allow such a debacle to take place?
District officials now say the school buildings - and the district's construction procedures - have been fixed. The end result of this painful and controversial year, the officials say, is that the high-achieving students of Homosassa Elementary now have a school to be proud of.
Not everyone agrees.
Even with all the repairs and inspections, structural engineer Jimmy D. Schilling is uncertain about the wind-worthiness of Homosassa Elementary.
Schilling said he worries about the expertise of the workers who performed the repairs and about the independence of the project team.
If it sounds like Schilling is dismissing all the hired consultants and inspectors who descended on the school site, consider this:
He's an expert in diagnosing and repairing shoddy construction. He diagnosed the Homosassa problem and knew how extensive it was just by reviewing a handful of construction photographs. He voluntarily traveled from Satellite Beach to Homosassa to show district construction officials and the building's design engineer the construction defects he saw firsthand and in the photos.
Schilling has frequently been employed as an expert witness for the Florida Department of Professional Regulation's investigations of buildings that were deficient in construction or design.
Yet at Homosassa, nearly all of his counsel was disregarded.
Schilling recommended that the district bring in independent experts - from the testing company to the design engineer, to the inspectors and the contractor - to assess the problem, make the repairs and inspect the fix. That didn't happen.
Instead, the district allowed the original construction team to work as the repair team. It hired a civil engineering firm to review the various reports produced by the team and a construction litigation firm to advise the School Board attorney on the legal ramifications.
"It really doesn't make sense to put the repairs into the hands of the same people who were involved in the problem in the first place," Schilling said.
For instance, he said, "it takes higher technical skills" to fix a badly constructed building than it takes to construct a building from scratch, he said. "If they didn't bring in experts who really know what to do, I really wonder" if the repairs were adequate, Schilling said, "because it's tough to know how to do it."
Schilling said that, in buildings as defective as the Homosassa media center and cafeteria, the repairs need to be performed by "some of the big boys who do this for a living."
Indeed, problems arose with the work force while repairs were under way. Early on, project engineer Ted Williamson told the School Board that his repair instructions were not being followed by those fixing the cafeteria.
He stopped the workers, making them retrace their steps and do the repairs correctly.
In meeting after meeting, Williamson told the board that there were not enough workers or not enough skilled workers on the site.
Later, when the cafeteria work was finished and the laborers moved to the media center, construction officials noted that crews were finally moving faster because they had gotten the hang of doing the repairs.
Schilling, who has a full-time engineering job that regularly takes him from the East Coast to California, said he wasn't kept abreast of the work at the school.
"I really don't know how (the repairs) actually played out," he said.
He reviewed information provided to him by the Times, discussed the building defects and proposed repairs with Williamson, and traveled to Homosassa to point out the defects he saw - all at no cost to the district or the newspaper.
Schilling said his motivation was to ensure that the young students were in a safe building.
He even offered to examine the roof of other campus buildings, again at no cost to the district, when questions were raised about stability. But time and again, the district turned him down.
Schilling may get some comfort about the buildings' integrity when the ongoing investigations are completed by the state's licensing boards for engineers, architects, contractors and building code administrators. To date, regulators have not released any findings. There's another step that would eliminate Schilling's concern: The district could hire experts to examine the buildings now, even though most of the repairs aren't detectable to the naked eye.
"You can still look and see if they ever welded the roof properly ... by the burn marks," he said. "You can see if they attached the roof to the interior walls.
"They could hire a company that specializes in using ground-penetrating radar, and they'll have a recorded image of what's there. If they see voids (in the walls, where steel or grout should be), they can go right to the square inch (to repair it)."
Moreover, he said, "it would certainly tell you if they ever tied the corners of the buildings together."
Schilling said the recordings are made "almost at walking speed ... they just roll down the side of the buildings."
But school officials say they are confident that they followed the steps needed to make the media center and cafeteria sound. While they still do not have the final written report from Rimkus Consulting Group, consultants hired as a "third set of eyes" on repairs, School Board attorney Richard "Spike" Fitzpatrick asked a Rimkus representative point blank if the buildings were sound.
They are, the Rimkus rep said.
School Board Chairwoman Pat Deutschman dismissed Schilling's criticisms.
"That falls under the gigantic conspiracy theory," she said. "People were all conspiring to do what? Conspire to get money . . . he's kind of out in left field."
She said she might be more willing to listen to his concerns if Schilling had stayed involved in the project and was aware of all the details of what the district did to protect its interests.
James Hughes, executive director of support services, also disputed Schilling's concerns about the quality of the repairs.
"I have a high level of confidence in the decisions we have made carefully regarding the repair work," he said. As far as the need for independent eyes to examine the flawed buildings, oversee the repairs and conclude whether the structures are sound, Hughes said he thinks that Rimkus Consulting Group provided all the district needed.
The firm's representative reviewed the documentation of the repairs that were overseen by a testing firm. Hughes said he was confident that the buildings will be sound and ready to house children and staff members.
Although the cafeteria is substantially done and children have been using it for three months, repairs on the media center were only recently completed. A final walk-through of the building is scheduled for this week.
Officials said they never dreamed that the work would take so long, even though Schilling predicted from the beginning that it would take a year to do the job right. Hughes said the defects in the buildings were more numerous and substantial than he himself could have imagined.
As the repairs progressed and the district stopped paying builder R.E. Graham, some subcontractors said they had not been paid. Some backed off the job, which delayed the completion.
School officials are confident that they will be able to move into the media center soon, possibly even opening it for students to tour before they leave for summer break.
District officials also hope that by summer's end, they will have in place the procedural improvements recommended by the Blue Ribbon Committee and a separate report from the state Department of Education, which also reviewed the Homosassa fiasco.
The district also asked for a proposal from an Orlando firm to assist in drawing up new construction project procedures.
Hughes said he was grateful that the problems came to light, but the self-examination process was a difficult one.
"As tough as this has been, there has been tremendous learning coming from it," he said.
The Blue Ribbon panel said the district's safeguards were so lax that if other schools were better constructed than Homosassa's two buildings, it was just luck.
Hughes said the Homosassa problems showed it isn't sufficient to assume people are doing their jobs; the district must have a specific way to verify that performance.
"You need a formalized system to prove that the work is being done and the services you're paying for are being delivered," he said.
At Homosassa, complaints about the workmanship were repeatedly ignored.
A subcontractor told district building official Dick Dolbow about missing reinforcements in a load-bearing wall. Dolbow asked project manager Sam DiGuglielmo to check out the complaint, but DiGuglielmo found no problem. He later said he had looked at a wall in the wrong building.
Other complaints about construction went unheeded, according to workers on the job. The severe building defects didn't come to light until weeks later, when photographs of botched construction were provided to the newspaper.
Deutschman, the board chairwoman, said the district needs to set a measurable quality standard, put it in writing and then communicate it to everyone associated with future construction.
"It should be the district's job of setting the standard and enforcing it," Deutschman said. By allowing each employee and each professional hired by the board to set their own rules for what was required to complete their task, "we created an environment that allowed this to happen."
A member of the Blue Ribbon Committee had called the Homosassa project "the perfect storm."
"Here you unfortunately had an accumulation of people who simultaneously had a pretty low standard for quality," Deutschman said. "And the school district was no different. The school system screwed up like the rest of them."
In the future, the rules should require regular photographs of phases of construction, detailed field reports by the project manager, and scores of other forms of documentation, checks and balances, she said.
None of the district employees involved in the Homosassa project has been disciplined, according to personnel records.
Hughes is the only employee who will move to a different and lesser job next year. School superintendent Sandra "Sam" Himmel has said that move is not related to Homosassa.
Deutschman said the new leader in Hughes' old job, Mike Mullen, must take a firm hand with facilities and construction to implement the coming changes.
"They are going to have to set a very high standard," she said. "He will have to communicate it on down the line. His work will be to change the environment in the organization so that the expectation is known, communicated and met."
Diane Toto, president of the Homosassa Civic Club, said she was encouraged to see that Hughes was being replaced and that Himmel and Deutschman were working to improve the district's processes.
But, like Schilling, she still questions the secrecy level the district has maintained over the problems and even the repairs to the problems.
"If they had been more open, there wouldn't have been so much distrust," Toto said. "It's unfortunate that it took so much public pressure to get things done."
Toto said she thinks the district is saying all the right things, but she and the community want to be sure change is made. "The community is definitely on guard and less trustful of anybody," she said. "Do we feel they (the buildings) are safe? We have no proof."
She maintains that too many questions remain on the project, including questions about what happened to the steel reinforcements that should have been in the buildings' walls and beams, especially since more were ordered than were needed. She also said she thinks the community wants to see someone held accountable for the debacle.
"It's not a perfect world," Toto said. "The best we hoped for is change in district policy, a hope it would never happen again and a few people held responsible." That would have helped restore some of the public trust, she said.
Superintendent Himmel said she didn't know whether the district has restored the public trust but thinks that once residents see people doing the jobs they are supposed to do, the trust will return.
"What's important in a situation like this is that once we realize there is a problem, we have to be very proactive to take care of it," Himmel said.
It has been a painful, trying year for Homosassa Elementary. Students and staff members suffered through months of controversy over the construction, weeks of dislocation while their campus was torn up, and more recently, the devastating murder of student Jessica Lunsford.
Regina Allegretta, the school's first-year principal, said she was grateful for the district's support.
"Our district is definitely a community, a family, and when we're in a pinch, everyone pulls together," Allegretta said.
"We learn from our mistakes. Unfortunately somebody has to suffer, but I believe as a society we learn from our mistakes," Allegretta said.
"As a teacher I used to say, it's okay if we make a mistake. That's how we learn. It's a smart person who doesn't make the same mistake again," she said.
"That's what I think about our building fiasco. I don't think that the Citrus County schools will ever allow this to happen again."
Barbara Behrendt can be reached at 564-3621 or behrendt@sptimes.com Collins Conner can be reached at 1-800-333-7505, ext. 6243 or conner@sptimes.com