School district hopes to build Burlington High School in 4 years

BURLINGTON, Vt. (WCAX) - We are learning more about how Burlington High School is moving forward with the plan to build a brand new school. This comes after harmful PCBs were found on the property and in the building off North Avenue.

Monday night, Burlington Schools Superintendent Tom Flanagan presented the probable timeline for the beginning process to build a new school.

First, the district is doing a major search throughout Burlington with a real estate firm they’ve contracted with to identify 5-10 sites that seem viable, including the current site of the high school. That process is expected to take around 6-8 weeks.

Then they will narrow the options down to a few to test and create conceptual designs.

Flanagan says he’s reluctant to say how long he thinks the entire process will take, but he is aiming for four years until students can be in a brand new school.

“That’s a really aggressive timeline and probably faster than most people are telling me we can get this done. So, we’ll just really need to work hard to get to a place where we are in a high school in that general timeline,” Flanagan said.

Through extra PCB testing on the current school grounds, they have identified that the current site can be viable and will be weighed against other options on the cost.

The Burlington school district says they could be looking at putting a new bond on the ballot for voters as soon as this November. It’s not set in stone yet, but it’s a real possibility as they would like to lease the Downtown BHS Macy’s building for as little time as possible.

There’s still no word on how much this project will cost.

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