More money being spent on new Harding Elementary

YOUNGSTOWN — The city school board will spend another $75,000 on what it hopes will be the final effort to correct heating and cooling problems at an elementary school opened just four years ago on Cordova Avenue.

“There have been problems from day one,” Tony DeNiro, assistant superintendent for school business affairs, told the board moments before he board authorized Western Reserve Mechanical, the original heating and cooling contractor on the $7.8 million school project, $69,900 to install new piping and related materials to six or seven rooms at Harding Elementary.

Those rooms are not getting “optimum temperatures,” said Steven Ludwinski of Heery International, the school district’s construction manager.

The board also agreed to pay Johnson Controls, the original temperature controls contractor on the job, $5,640 to provide the new control valves and related materials for the work to be done by Western Reserve.

The Ohio School Facilities Commission is expected to pick up 80 percent of both contracts.

This is the third time the board has had to act on the heating/cooling problems in the school, which houses some 400 children.

Read more in Sunday’s Vindicator and Vindy.com