Morris High board approves Bulley & Andrews Construction for school addition

The Morris Community High School board approved an agreement with Bulley & Andrews Construction to handle the $67 million addition voters approved in the March election.

Superintendent Craig Ortiz said the district sent out a request for qualification that received 11 responses, and Board members Lynn Vermillion and Scot Hastings were involved in selecting Bulley & Andrews from a list of four finalists.

“We really wanted to find somebody who has worked with schools before,” Ortiz said. “It is different from building an office building, I think, from what I’ve seen.”

Vermillion said there’s a rubric of different things she and Scot graded each company on, and companies weren’t given preference over another.

Hastings asked Elizabeth Shields, the school’s Chief Business Official, how using a construction manager would differ from bidding out the project as a single package.

“They hire all the subs (subcontractors),” Shields said. “They would have to provide those (subcontractors) in advance so we could do the scope reviews and things like that. They would have to demonstrate that they have plenty of bonding limits for the project and in its entirety, all the (subcontractors) in that as well.”

Hastings said one thing about Bulley & Andrews he appreciates is they have a superintendent who will be on-site for the project every day who is a Morris Community High School graduate, who went through the trades programs at the Grundy Area Vocational Center and who lives locally.

With a construction manager, there are between 20 and 25 bids, Hastings said, and the other option is there just being one bid.

There were concerns raised during the public commenting period that none of the final four bidding companies being considered among were from Morris, though none of the bidders were from Morris.

Ortiz told the Morris Herald-News in that December 2024 story that the separate buildings were a safety concern, since kids were moving around all day and the doors were constantly locking and unlocking.

It also gets the cafeteria out of the basement, adds more classrooms, and provides enough funding to renovate older parts of the school, replace HVAC systems, and allow the district to upgrade the electrical service.

Clarification: An earlier version of this story said none of the bidders were from Morris, though Narvick Bros. Construction were among the original bidders. They were not among the final four companies being considered. Ortiz said after the meeting that the companies being considered all had experience building schools before.