Pittsburgh firm to study potential Eastern Westmoreland tech center update

Officials at the Eastern Westmoreland Career and Technology Center hope by early winter to have a firm idea what needs to be done to bring their 43-year-old building up to date.

To get to that point, the Derry Township-based school’s joint operating committee this week voted to pay HHSDR Architects/Engineers of Pittsburgh $8,500 to conduct a comprehensive feasibility study of the center.

Built in 1976, the roughly 100,000-square-foot center provides hands-on instruction to about 540 students from Derry Area, Greater Latrobe and Ligonier Valley school districts in subjects including automotive technology, cosmetology, graphic communications and welding.

Administrative director Todd Weimer said the school’s students are able to use state-of-the-art equipment, but their learning environment is aging. The building’s steel shell is rusting in many places, he noted.

HHSDR will “analyze all aspects of the construction of this building, its electrical and mechanical systems, the shell of the building and the parking lots,” Weimer said. “What they’re going to give us is a full report on the life expectancy of this building as it sits now and propose to us what needs to be done to get it up to today’s standards.

“They will take into consideration our programming and our potential future programming as they look at considerations for space, the internal structure and the layout of the building.”

As the technology center staff regularly does, HHSDR also will evaluate labor markets and the relevancy of the center’s courses, “so that our kids leave here and they can go get jobs or go to college,” Weimer said.

He said HHSDR should have a report ready by early winter, “so we can start planning what we’re going to do moving forward. What we intend to do is prioritize and, over the course of years, address the recommendations and the things that are needed.”

The school received five proposals for completing the feasibility study and narrowed the field to two companies that had experience working with technology centers. After representatives from the companies met with school officials and made formal presentations, “we were confident that HHSDR was going to be the best fit,” Weimer said.

HHSDR worked on an adult education building for Ford City’s Lenape Technical School, completed in 2014, and on renovation of the Monongahela Valley Career and Technology Center in Charleroi, completed in 2013.

The firm’s contract for the Eastern Westmoreland study is subject to review by the technology center’s solicitor.