New bathrooms on the horizon

Denise Azadeh, , , , and

Rumors about the renovations of the bathrooms have been floating around the school for months, but until now the administration had not made any official announcements regarding the topic. These rumors come just a year after two of the four bathrooms on the first floor of WY’s main building have been remodeled, leaving many hesitant to believe that another bathroom renovation would be in the cards so soon. To find out more about the situation, I turned to WY’s Dean of Students, Mr. John Fanning.
Fanning has confirmed that there will be an upgrade to the remaining two bathrooms on the first floor of the school’s main building. Supplies such as the sinks, faucets, and hand dryers have already been purchased and are stored safely in the basement. The holdup, he says, is with getting contractors approved to start the renovations. The Chicago Public School system has many rules in place when it comes to hiring vendors, so many in fact that they have an entire 15 page chapter of the Board Rule Book dedicated to outlining these laws. The issue that the school has encountered when looking for vendors is that one of the rules puts in place a ten thousand dollar spending cap per fiscal year. While, in theory, this is a smart rule to have in place, it ends up delaying projects and causing issues when schools need to make purchases above that limit. Right now, this rule is hurting the school’s renovation project in two ways:
First, it is preventing the faculty from buying all of the supplies that they can from the cheapest vendor. WY has enough sinks and faucets to supply the renovation of four bathrooms. However, the school has only the hand dryers to supply two bathrooms. The school has already capped out their limit with Global Industrial, the vendor they purchased these items from, so they can no longer buy any more until the end of the fiscal year (July 1). They could buy these products from another vendor like Granger, but Granger’s hand dryers are priced at $1,500 a piece, while Global Industrial’s are only $750 a piece. This leaves the school in a tough situation: do they pay double the price or wait an entire year to get the materials they need? In an attempt to avoid making that decision, the school has reached out to other vendors for bids – this means that the school has told multiple companies what renovations they are looking to get done and each company will return with their best offer.
The second issue is that because the school is only able to spend ten thousand dollars on bathroom renovations, the job is not as lucrative as some other contracts on the market. If WY could say, “Hey, we have thirty thousand dollars to spend on getting six bathrooms renovated,” the bids would be flooding in, but unfortunately the cap prevents the school from making that kind of offer. This means that our contract takes less priority over larger ones, and the bids come in slowly and infrequently. Currently, the lack of bids means that the school is unable to hire anyone to remodel the bathrooms. As soon as the school can find someone for the job, they plan on getting it done. As Fanning said, “If we can find vendors, I’ve got money to spend.”