Imagine you are the Superintendent of a medium-sized school district. Your entire career has been dedicated to creating the very best learning environment for your kids. One that is safe and secure and ensures that students, teachers, and staff have facilities they can be proud of.
As your community grows, so do the needs of your district. Every year, there is mounting pressure to maximize school budgets, upgrade facilities, and add capacity by building more schools.
Every year, it seems like it’s a fight with the school board and community to get the support you need to keep up with the demand. Budgets are stretched to the breaking point, and the district is barely keeping up with all the projects underway.
This has been your battle for years, and you don’t ever see it getting any better.
A few years ago, you oversaw one of your district’s largest successful bond elections in decades. You fought hard to get your community’s approval to finally address your student population growth. You were successful in getting the bond passed, which led to the construction of two new elementary schools —something desperately needed.
At the time, going through the process of building a new school, let alone two, was new to you. You had never been through this type of construction, so you had little understanding of what to expect. The district hired an architect and a project manager to oversee the entire process. You felt confident they were the right partners on an overwhelming task ahead.
They helped you select the right contractors and subs. They seemingly helped you navigate the critical design decisions and unexpected challenges that arose during construction. You felt confident that they were managing the project for you and, of course, had the district’s best interest at heart.
When both schools were done, they were magnificent. Everything you could have hoped for and then some. Your school board was proud, and your community was over the moon with praise and support for what you had built for them.
The process wasn’t as painful as you thought it was going to be. When you did your final walkthrough, you beamed with pride at what you were placing into service for your students and staff.
At closeout, you received a bunch of paperwork. It seemed like 100 pounds of binders at the time. You couldn’t hide nor hair of what was in them. It seemed like a bunch of disorganized construction documents that you had no clue about. You paid it no mind at the time, because you were too consumed with how amazing the two new facilities were to really care about documentation.
What you didn’t realize at the time was that the documentation you were given was incomplete. It was a sanitized version of what each stakeholder provided as the project ended. Warranty documentation was missing. The installation detail was missing. Lots of essential and critical documentation that the district should have been given was simply not there.
But you had no idea.
Your project manager was ready to move on to their next project. They didn’t understand at all what you had been given. Your architect had long since moved on to other projects happening for their firm, so they were no help.
There was no one at the time helping you understand what you were ultimately receiving. To you, it was a bunch of binders full of miscellaneous stuff that you might have to refer back to at some point in the future. But at the time, all you cared about was getting the keys to your two new buildings.
Four years later, you are sitting in your office when you get the call. The crack in one of the two new buildings you’ve been arguing with the contractor who built the school to fix for months has reopened. Last night’s conversation has weakened the structure enough that tragedy has just struck. Drywall and the lights that run the length of the cafeteria have fallen during lunch. Students are hurt.
School districts are in the education business, not the construction business. However, whenever a school undergoes renovation or a new construction project, it becomes the Owner. As the Owner, they are ultimately responsible and liable for any consequences arising from construction efforts.
As the Superintendent, you had no idea that the team that installed your roof had rushed their work. You had no idea that they performed much of that work in the rain the year before the school even opened. Items such as bracing and bolts were never checked by anyone other than the individual contractors who installed them. There was no inspection paperwork available during this critical phase of construction. There was no way for you to know that, in the haste to accelerate the installation, construction guys were performing their jobs without checks and balances.
You are, after all, an educator, not a construction manager.
But as kids are headed to the hospital and the district’s lawyer is holding on line three, you sort of wonder if you should have been. You wonder where all those binders you were given are now. Your lawyer is undoubtedly going to want them.
The reality is that most superintendents are just like you. They want to build a clean, safe, and amazing learning space for students and staff. They don’t know about roof construction. They don’t know how to lay adhesion or why cracks occur. They have little appreciation for which brand of locks is installed on the school’s doors. How are schools supposed to know whether the glass rating on the installed windows can handle 70MPH winds?
But when you are the Superintendent, you walk away with more than just the keys to a newly renovated or newly constructed facility. You walk away with the potential headaches and liability as well. That is why, as Superintendent, you have to be concerned with every single aspect of every conceivable detail that goes into your facilities. It’s not precisely the job it’s signed up for. But as the Superintendent, if your district is going to have any construction, it ultimately becomes a job you are responsible for.
We are Owner Insite! A construction project management software built for school districts. A set of tools to help make your job as the Owner of any renovation or new construction project easier.
We are passionate about helping school district leaders create a predictable, repeatable approach to ensuring projects are completed correctly. It begins by providing a proven process for documenting, tracking, and managing critical construction data for anyone involved in your district’s project.
The district’s system, which ensures everyone—from your architect and engineer to every single contractor—provides your district with unfiltered, accurate information about exactly the work they are being paid to perform for you. Our software offers transparency and accountability, ensuring no shortcuts are ever taken and that every member of your construction project team has a platform to document and communicate their work.
Owner Insite is passionate about helping school district leaders play an involved role in their projects. We want to ensure they walk away with all the construction documentation they need to protect their district’s interests during their term.
Clearly, we hope that nothing ever happens that injures anyone in your district. But if it does, there is no doubt your attorney will ask for any documentation that you have on your project. Isn’t it better to have information in order and in a way that makes sense?
That only happens when that information is placed correctly in an owner-focused platform like Owner Insite.
Owner Insite is more than construction project management for a K-12 school district. It’s a compliment for your district’s insurance policy.
