FACILITIES, OPERATIONS & TRANSPORTATION
5240 Geiger Blvd. Colorado Springs, CO  80915  (map)
   Frank Bernhard, P.E., Executive Director
phone 477-6004,  fax 477-6065

 The organization is made up of two regular departments, Facilities and Transportation, and two support functional offices.  The organization is depicted on the attached chart.  The functions are discussed below.

FACILITIES.  The District has a significant investment in facilities.  There are over 65 schools and support sites with a total of over 4.1 million square feet of building space on over 725 acres of land supporting about 32,000 students. The oldest permanent building is Whittier Elementary School, which was built in 1901, and the newest is the FOTC (Facilities, Operations and Transportation Center) that was completed in November 2000.  The average age of the District’s facilities in 2004 was 42 years.  The total value of the real property plant account is over $800 million.  The District expends an annual General Fund budget of about $7 million for facilities maintenance and operations.  It spends another $6 million a year from the Capital Reserve Fund for capital projects (repairs, alterations, construction and real property acquisition projects exceeding $25,000; procurement of capitalized equipment over $2,500; and debt service on COPs).  The District last passed a bond in 1996, the only bond in the past 30 years!

 Facilities maintenance, repair and construction are performed by a combination of in-house shops and contractors.  The in-house shops are focused on emergencies response, preventive maintenance and corrective maintenance, but also have a limited capability for smaller repair and construction projects (typically costing less than $10,000).  Contractors are typically used for the larger projects.  This department has 90 full-time regular positions and between 10 and 30 temporary and seasonal part-time employees.

Facilities Planning performs or supervises the efforts of master planning, conceptual planning, space use planning and limited design planning; real estate management and acquisition; facilities standards and criteria development and management; facilities records and archives management; and execution of assigned construction projects and contracts.  It is headed by the District’s Architect and is accomplished with a staff of two other regular positions and is augmented with hired consultant support.

Chief of Mechanical Systems is a registered mechanical engineer and is responsible for the engineering investigation of mechanical systems (HVAC, or heating, ventilating and air-conditioning, and plumbing) issues and the engineering and project management of mechanical systems projects and contracts.

Maintenance Management is the operations “muscle” of the department including both the work control and the shops supervision functions. 

Work Control includes the reception, prioritization, scheduling and tracking of all work (8,000-10,000 work orders annually); the assessment of the physical condition of the District’s real property; and the preliminary project investigation and planning and estimating of specific work requests; and manages a host of support service contracts (e.g. elevator maintenance, pest control, fire extinguishers, etc.). It is accomplished with a staff of three full-time regular ESP.

Maintenance Shops are the primary method by which daily routine facilities maintenance work is accomplished.  It is managed by an assistant director, a licensed architect or engineer, who supervises the facilities maintenance shops totaling about 70 full-time regular ESP and up to an additional 30 part-time seasonal employees. 

 The facilities maintenance shops are:

·         Electric Shop includes the electricians and alarm technicians.  It performs or provides management of maintenance, repair and minor construction of electrical, power generation, emergency lighting, fire alarm, security intrusion detection and alarm and central school clock systems.

·        Mechanical Shop includes the plumbers, pipe fitters, HVAC technicians, and kitchen equipment technician.  It performs or provides management of maintenance, repair and minor construction of the heating, ventilating and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems; water and waste-water plumbing systems and fixtures; swimming pools; and kitchen and foods service major appliances.

·      Landscape Shop includes the groundskeepers, landscapers, heavy equipment operators, and stadium manager.  It performs or manages all landscape, sprinkler irrigation systems, playgrounds, athletic fields and asphalt pavements maintenance, repair or minor construction; and performs district-wide snow removal.

·        Construction Shop includes the carpentry, locksmith, welding, masonry, painting, roofing and glazing trades.  It performs or manages maintenance, repair, and minor construction of all structural and architectural components of district building and the concrete pavements. 

·       Environmental Services Office is a sub element of the Construction Shop, and is comprised of one environmental technician who is responsible for managing the District’s hazardous materials and hazardous waste programs and managing related investigations and remediation efforts.  A considerable amount of effort goes into managing asbestos containing materials and school hazardous materials and generated hazardous wastes.

TRANSPORTATION.  By district policies about 8,000 of the District’s students are eligible for district provided transportation.  About 500 of these are special needs children requiring transportation by federal law.  The District currently operates 95-100 daily student transportation routes on a three-tier system (providing three basic start and stop times, allowing most buses to cover three routes each).  Almost half of the routes support the special needs transportation requirement.  In addition to the 130 buses, the District also operates some 120 support vehicles.  Most of these are used by the Facilities Department.

The Transportation Department manages and operates the District’s student transportation system; manages and provides maintenance for all district transportation, vehicular or motorized equipment; and provides maintenance support for hundreds of small gas engine powered pieces of equipment.  Most services with the exception of a few specialized maintenance functions are provided with in-house forces. The department also provides some reimbursable transportation services to district charter schools and to some of the smaller area school districts.  This department manages an annual Transportation Fund budget of about $4.7 million and has about 145 positions, most of which are bus drivers that typically work a 10½ month schedule. 

Transportation Operations is the operating arm of the Transportation Department including regular daily bus routes, special education transportation, field trip and special activities support transportation.  It also includes both the planning and development of student transportation routes and support of the related technology systems.  The drivers and attendants are organized into three teams, each supervised by a senior driver, team leader. 

Fleet Maintenance manages the maintenance, repair and replacement programs for all district student transportation and support vehicular assets.  It also does the maintenance for the District’s small gas engine powered equipment such as mowers, snow blower, etc.  This is accomplished primarily with the in-house force of transportation mechanics. Maintenance support is also provided to other area school districts on a cost reimbursable basis. 

Transportation support functions include two Safety Trainers and two office support data entry technicians. 

WAREHOUSE AND CUSTODIAL OPERATIONS.  This is actually two distinct functions (Warehouse Operations and Custodial Support) under a single manager.

Warehouse Operations -- The District operates a central warehouse for the distribution of selected stocked items (primarily instructional materials and food service support); receipt of bulk items; receipt and marking of inventories equipment; and the redistribution or disposal of excess equipment, furnishings and materials.  Over the past nine years the District has reduced the stocked inventory by almost a million dollars through a program of contracting out selected materials to just-in-time delivery vendors.  Most of these contracts have been in the areas of office supplies, custodial supplies and paper products.  Nevertheless, the warehouse still stocks and manages some 2000 different items, most of which are instructional supplies and foods products for the Food Service program.  The warehouse is staffed by five warehousemen/drivers.

Custodial Operations -- The District’s custodial operations function is site-based and site managed for the school custodians, but is centrally supported with a custodial manager.  Custodial operations cost about $7 million a year.

School Custodial Operations.  The custodial staff assigned to the schools is under the site principal for supervision, daily work assignments, and personnel administration (including hiring, firing and performance evaluation).  Each school has one building manager (typically a daytime assignment) and at least one or more full or part time custodians.  Middle schools are authorized to have an Assistant Building Manager, and high schools have a Night Supervisor, a building mechanic and an assistant building mechanic.  The building mechanics are to provide an on-site capability to operate and maintain the more complex equipment that the high schools have.  All school custodial operations are charged with some level of grounds maintenance and snow removal and minor building maintenance (including some preventive maintenance), in addition to cleaning.  School site custodial staffing is based upon a model that uses average cleaning area and average students supported per FTE.

 Custodial Operations Support is provided to the school sites in the areas of: developing the District’s standards for custodial job descriptions and qualifications; managing the custodial training and skills development program; managing the custodial equipment replacement program; maintaining the District-wide custodial resource model; disbursing the custodial staffing and supplies budget allocations; managing the “rover” (custodial substitute) pool; and upon request assisting site supervisors with evaluating the performance, efficiency and effectiveness of the site custodial operations.

 Administrative Campus/FOTC Custodial Operations function provides operational support and custodial operations to the administrative campus at the corner of El Paso and Uintah and the FOTC at Geiger and Babcock roads.  This includes support to after-hour activities and meetings including the Board of Education meetings as well as daily and cyclical cleaning.

 ENERGY MANAGEMENT is a centrally managed district-wide program that is dependent upon each site doing the actual energy conservation work at their site.  In order to offset the rising costs of energy (utilities), the District operates the RCM (resource conservation management) program to develop and implement a wide variety of energy management and saving programs.  Although the District’s utilities are funded and paid centrally, the site actually controls the costs through their operations.  A shared saving incentive awards program passes back a portion of the savings realized to the schools.  Utilities annually make up about $4 million in district expenditures.  However, over the past few years the District has avoided over $1.4 million of utilities costs through its conservation programs and efforts.  The District is the third largest water-consumer in the city, and through its aggressive efforts has been a major contributor to the city-wide water conservation program.

 The Energy Manager oversees and manages the District’s utilities, utilities supply contracts, and the energy management and resource conservation programs.  This function is charged with identifying, investigating, and responding to opportunities for energy and resource saving while maintaining or improving system and service reliability.  Services are typically performed through the use of specialized consultants and contractors. This is a two-person function staffed with an electrical engineer and the RCM program coordinator.

 OFFICE SERVICES.  The organization pools its clerical staff to provide the clerical, secretarial, personnel tracking, budget management and analysis functions for the department.  This function is supervised by the office manager who is also the secretary to the executive director.

 PROCUREMENT SUPPORT is provided by an on-site procurement office that is a satellite operation of the Procurement and Contracting Department.  This office provides the bulk of the procurement and contracting support for the Facilities, Transportation, Warehouse, Custodial and Energy Management functions.

[updated 7/29/2008]