KINGSTON, N.Y. — The Board of Education has approved spending $1.5 million to install air conditioning in the century-old main building at Kingston High School.
The money will come from the $16 million that remains of the voter-approved funding for the recent expansion and renovation of the multibuilding KHS campus in Midtown Kingston.
“A sprinkling of spaces [in the main building] have already been air-conditioned,” KSQ Architects representative Armand Quadrini told the school board at its most recent meeting. “Mostly office space and summer support space.”
The new system, to be mounted on the school roof, is to provide air conditioning to 40 rooms and instructional areas on all three floors of the building, which faces Broadway and is across from Kingston City Hall.
“The engineers are pretty confident we can [use] existing shafts to get our piping from the classrooms up to the roof,” Quadrini said. “It should be a fairly straightforward project.”
District officials hope the work can be done in the summer of 2022, but the project can’t begin until approval is received from the state Education Department. The timing of that approval is uncertain because of staffing shortages in the department.
“We are getting technical reviews done in four weeks, but … there’s only two [Education Department] project managers processing the permits,” Quadrini said.
“There [also] are supply line issues,” he cautioned.
The expansion/renovation project for the Kingston High School campus was approved by voters in 2013 with the cost expected to be $137.5 million.
The project, completed in 2018, included demolition of the Myron J. Michael Building, a former junior high school on the property, as well as the Whiston/Tobin Building; renovations to about 41,000 square feet inside the main building, which dates to 1915; improvements to the Kate Walton Field House; and the addition of two new classroom wings, totaling 181,400 square feet, at the rear of the Salzmann Building.
Quadrini said the air conditioning work in the main building will be aided by lessons learned during the larger project.
