PRINCE FREDERICK — Every drinking fountain, toilet and kitchen sink at Calvert Elementary School and Calvert Country School runs on one well, and that well was dug in 1958. This year it started pushing sand through the pipes.
The Calvert County Board of Education voted 5-0 this month to spend $53,460 on an emergency relining of the well, a repair school facilities staff described as necessary to keep both schools open until a public water line can reach the campus, probably not before summer 2028.
The money buys time, not a permanent fix. And one board member warned it may be a preview: without more money for the school system’s maintenance backlog, he said, Calvert could start seeing more emergency spending like this.
Sand, scale and holes in the casing
Shachita Warner of the school system’s facilities office told the board that the two neighboring schools in Prince Frederick share a single on-site well for daily operations. Earlier this year, significant sand intrusion turned up in the water distribution system.
Inspections that followed found extensive deterioration, Warner said: heavy scale buildup, pitting holes in the well casing and material that had migrated into the well screen and blocked parts of it. Emergency cleaning and new pumping equipment restored service for the time being, but the structural problems remained.
The well has outlived its expected service life, she said, and if it failed, the effects would be immediate at both buildings: no drinking water, no working restrooms, no food service and potential problems meeting building occupancy requirements. Facilities management concluded that immediate corrective action was needed to protect students, staff and visitors.
The work includes cleaning and inspecting the well, installing a stainless steel liner and screen assembly, redeveloping the well, reinstalling the pumps and testing the system. Warner said the job should stop the sand, restore the well’s structural integrity and extend its useful life.
Borrowing a St. Mary’s contract
To move quickly, the school system used an emergency cooperative procurement rather than its own bid process. Sheldon Taylor, the school system’s supervisor of finance and procurement, said the award to A.C. Schultes of Maryland piggybacks on contract 2308F from the St. Mary’s County Metropolitan Commission, the water and sewer utility in the neighboring county.
That contract was competitively bid and expressly allows other governments to use it, Taylor said, which gives Calvert a timely, procurement-compliant way to handle what he called a critical infrastructure need. The $53,460 comes out of the facilities management operating budget, so no budget transfer was needed.
Why not just replace it?
The campus is already slated for a rebuild. The state agreed to support a new Calvert Country School, the county’s public special education school, only if it is co-located with Calvert Elementary, according to a feasibility study the school system presented to the board in August 2025. That study also floated keeping the existing Calvert Elementary building as swing space for future projects such as Mount Harmony Elementary.
Asked how the well repair fits with that project, Warner said the school system expects to finish construction of the new Calvert Elementary and Calvert Country building by December 2030.
The project includes extending the public water line that now serves the water tower at Calvert High School. But that extension realistically cannot be built until about summer 2028, Warner said, so the existing well has to keep running until then. Once the line is built, the plan is to connect it to the new co-located school, the existing campus and the school system’s Brooks Administration Building.
The pipe would run through a county right-of-way. Warner said the school system is drafting an agreement with Calvert County government to build the line and then turn it over to the county to maintain.
Another board member asked whether changes to the Prince Frederick town center would help the water line. Warner said a parcel across the street has been designated a priority funding area, though it was not added to the town center itself. Priority funding areas are the places where Maryland directs state money for growth-related infrastructure under its Smart Growth law.
A backlog behind the emergency
The same board member tied the well to a larger problem the board has heard about before. Calvert has a significant backlog of maintenance, he said, and without enough funding to start working it down, the system may see more emergency expenditures. Sixty-eight years out of one well, he added, is a long run.
The numbers behind that warning are large. In September, the school system presented a $223.8 million capital construction plan and cautioned that a shrinking state funding share and rising construction costs were leaving it further behind on aging buildings. At the same meeting where the well was approved, the board heard that the school system drew far less from savings last year than planned, a cushion detailed in the Chronicle’s report on Calvert’s clean FY26 audit. The finance office also said part of the committed fund balance is set aside for emergencies.
Field house design for Patuxent
The board also voted 5-0 to hire Centennial Contractors Enterprises for $190,550 to design a new athletic field house at Patuxent High School’s stadium. Taylor first presented the figure as $198,900, then corrected it to $190,550. The work goes through Sourcewell cooperative contract 05041 and is paid from the school construction fund, using local capital money set aside for the project.
The approval covers design only. The planned building would have team locker rooms, public restrooms, space for coaches and game officials, and storage. Warner said design will cover site investigation, surveying, soil testing, permitting and utility coordination so that any construction request is based on a fully vetted scope. Construction would come back to the board as a separate vote.
The field house would sit outside the stadium’s turf field and should not affect it, Warner said, though utilities will have to be run to it and some stormwater management will likely be required. Asked whether Patuxent High is on well water or public water, she said she believes it is connected but would confirm and report back.
The Calvert Elementary well work is expected to proceed under the emergency award. The next major milestone for the campus is the water line extension, targeted for around summer 2028, followed by the new co-located school building in 2030.
