New London — The $49.5 million planned renovation of the city’s middle school reached a major milestone this week with site development plan approval from the city’s Planning & Zoning Commission.

Portions of the phased project are expected to go out to bid as early as this month. Plans call for demolition of an older portion of the school that was built in the 1930s and part of the former Chapman Technical High School building.

There will be an addition, renovations to classrooms and reconstruction of an interior courtyard. The school also will add outdoor recreation space, a new entrance and a half-court basketball court on the side of the building facing Lincoln Avenue.

The approved plan is part of an estimated $165 million overhaul of both Bennie Dover Jackson Middle School and New London High School to support the district’s burgeoning magnet school programs. The $108 million renovation of New London High School, while delayed several years, is now underway with an addition under construction. The project, slated for completion in 2023, also now is within budget following work to value engineer the initial project bids.

The plans for Bennie Dover do not presently include demolition and construction of a new Central Office building, which is adjacent to and in some ways physically connected to the middle school.

There had been a recent push to use the $5.5 million in contingency funds from the $55 million approved for the middle school project to replace what has been deemed the outdated and aging Central Office building. The City Council earlier this year amended language to the 2014 ordinance to include the Central Office project.

Preliminary cost estimates for the project, however, have exceeded $5.5 million. That has led project architects Perkins Eastman to modify construction plans and detach any shared services between the buildings, such as the information technology hub and fire suppression pump, which are both located in the Central Office building. Fire alarm, electrical and gas services also will need to be separated.

“This approach would result in the Central Office Building being completely de-coupled from the BDJMS facility and allow demolition of ... that structure in the future more easily and cleanly accomplished without the need to modify the BDJMS building,” Perkins Eastman Principal Joseph Costa wrote in a Sept. 11 letter to School Building and Maintenance Committee Chairman John Satti.

The hope among the project team is that bids come back under budget and there is more money to shift to the Central Office building project. The City Council will vote on the additional $65,700 in design costs for the changes at its meeting on Monday.

g.smith@theday.com