District Going Out To Bid For New School

The Long Branch School District has begun the bidding process fo the .

The district held a mandatory pre-bid meeting on Jan. 4 that was attended by contractors interested in bidding on the project, which is scheduled to break ground in July, according to Long Branch School District Public Information Officer Walter J. O'Neill.

In August 2009, education officials demolished the old Elberon Elementary School to make way for the Catrambone School, which will be larger and built on the same site. The Elberon Elementary School was located at 240 Park Ave. and was built in 1969.

Many Elberon students were relocated to Gregory and Anastasia schools after the school was demolished, and one of the purposes of the new school is to ease overcrowding concerns.

O'Neill said the pre-bid meeting was held at the Long Branch Board of Education Building on Broadway and was attended by 20 contractors.

The building is expected to cost $32.7 million and the state has said construction should begin in July.

The proposed Catrambone school has been delayed by a freeze on new school construction that Gov. Chris Christie imposed soon after taking office in January 2010. The governor decided that the New Jersey Schools Development Authority (SDA), the agency that handled the construction of city schools in the state, was plagued by waste and mismanagement.

Christie put a halt to all work on those projects under his people could review and reform the agency. That took about a year. In February, Christie decided that more than 50 projects on the drawing board, 10 of them could proceed and one of those was Catrambone.

Construction on Catrambone could take about two years, officials have said.

The two-story school will have 28 first- through fifth-grade classrooms, 10 preschool classrooms and seven kindergarten classrooms. In addition, the 109,000-plus square foot building will house a media center, gym, auditorium, technology discovery center, computer lab, science exploration center, a music room and an art room.

The school will be named after the former assistant superintendent of schools, George L. Catrambone, who retired in 2010.