PRINCE FREDERICK — Athletes, coaches and fans at Patuxent High School’s stadium are a step closer to a building of their own: team locker rooms, public restrooms, space for coaches and game officials, and storage, all under one roof beside the field.
The Calvert County Board of Education voted 5-0 this month to pay Centennial Contractors Enterprises $190,550 to design the Patuxent High School Stadium Field House. The work order covers architecture and engineering only. Any construction contract will come back to the board as a separate vote, school finance staff said.
The design phase is where the project gets a real price tag. Staff told the board that finishing the drawings will let the school system define what the building needs, check the cost, line up permits and bring the board a construction request based on a fully vetted scope.
A corrected price on the record
Sheldon Taylor, the school system’s supervisor of finance and procurement, first presented the work order at $198,900. After facilities staff described the project, he corrected the figure on the record to $190,550, about $8,350 less, and the board approved the lower amount.
The money comes from the school construction fund and will be charged to local capital improvement program dollars set aside for the project, Taylor said. That means county money, not state school construction aid, is paying for the design.
Rather than run its own bid, the school system is buying the design work through Sourcewell cooperative contract No. 05041, a contract already competitively bid by a national cooperative purchasing program that other public agencies can join. Calvert used the same approach at the same meeting for a different job: an emergency $53,460 relining of the 1958 well that serves Calvert Elementary School and Calvert Country School, bought through a St. Mary’s County Metropolitan Commission contract.
What the building would hold
Shachita Warner, director of facilities management, told the board the project is the first step toward a new athletic field house that would better serve student athletes, coaches, officials and spectators using the Lusby school’s stadium complex.
The planned building would include:
- Team locker rooms
- Public restrooms
- Coaches’ spaces and accommodations for game officials
- Storage, plus the mechanical and other systems to run the building
The $190,550 pays for site investigation, surveying, geotechnical analysis, architectural and engineering design, permitting support, utility coordination and the final contract documents a builder would bid on.
Turf, stormwater and water service
Board members asked how the field house would fit with the school system’s plan to put artificial turf on its high school stadium fields. Warner said the building would sit outside the stadium field itself, so it should fall outside the scope of the turf project, though crews will have to run utilities to it.
Turf is a big-ticket item of its own. The school system’s FY2028 capital plan, presented in September, added an $11 million request to install artificial turf at all four high school stadiums, up from an earlier $10 million estimate once stormwater requirements were counted. That same plan listed the Patuxent field house design as already underway.
Stormwater is likely to come up again. Asked whether the field house would need its own water management work, Warner said she expects the project will need some stormwater management, noting that smaller disturbances of less than about 5,000 square feet can sometimes avoid it. A civil engineer on the design team will address those requirements, she said.
A board member also asked whether Patuxent High runs on well water or is connected to a public system in the Solomons area. Warner said she believed the school is connected but was not sure and would follow up with the board. The question carried weight at a meeting where the board had just approved emergency money to keep a 68-year-old school well running.
Competing for local dollars
The field house joins a crowded list of locally funded needs. Calvert’s six-year capital plan totals about $223.8 million, with an estimated local share of $118.4 million, and the state’s share of school construction costs in Calvert is falling from 56% to 51% by FY2028, pushing more of the bill onto the county.
One board member warned during the well discussion that the system carries a significant maintenance backlog and that, without more money to address it, Calvert could see more emergency spending, as the Chronicle reported in its story on the $53,460 well repair.
The school system’s finances gave the board some room to work. Auditors told the board at the same meeting that the system drew about $5 million from reserves in FY2026 instead of the $11.7 million it budgeted, leaving $6.7 million more in fund balance than planned. The FY2027 budget plans an $11.1 million draw.
Board members did not discuss a construction budget or timeline for the field house. Those numbers are expected to come out of the design work and return to the board for a separate vote before any building goes up.
