This Rain Won’t Help the Flowers Grow

It rained indoors at HPISD’s McCulloch Intermediate School/Highland Park Middle School campus on Sept. 13 due to a failure of the schools’ HVAC chiller piping system.

A post on the district’s Facebook page shows water freely flowing from a ceiling and flooding a hallway.

The failure was the system’s second leak since the school year started in August, according to the post. 

A pipe burst on Sept. 3, causing a water leak in the campus’ cafeteria. Due to repairs, the school postponed that evening’s seventh-and eighth-grade curriculum night, MIS/HPMS principal Amanda Reyes said in an email to parents.

The system also leaked three times in the 2023-24 school year. Finalizing its repairs will cost a total of $8 to $12 million, according to the Facebook post. The chiller piping system repairs are among the immediate needs included in HPISD’s $137.3 million bond package that will appear on ballots this November.

The district began replacing the chiller piping system at MIS/HPMS during spring break. It continued work on the system between Memorial Day and late July, assistant superintendent for business services Scott Drillette said during a Sept. 3 board of trustees work session.

“It was roughly 50 people a day on site there all seven days a week trying to get more than a summer’s worth of work done in a summer,” he said. “And so, that work wasn’t completely finished.” 

Drillette added that the district did not expect to be able to complete the entire project, and was satisfied with the amount of work that was done. The district has fixed all the major sections of piping whose failure could have caused catastrophic leaks preventing use of the building.

He said that HPISD is continuing system repairs on weekends. It expects to have the “major part of (its) leak vulnerability taken care of” by Thanksgiving.