Norwich – After adjusting enrollment projections and shrinking the size of three planned new schools, officials overseeing the $385 million school construction project now say they can be done within the voter-approved bond measure.

The School Building Committee and the Board of Education met separately in special meetings Thursday and voted to recommend that the City Council cancel any plan to ask voters in November either to raise the price or reduce the scope of the project.

The council is set to hold public hearings at its 7:30 p.m. meeting Monday on competing ordinances, one to raise the total price of the project to $435 million to cover previously anticipated cost overruns and a second proposal to reduce the project to $342 million and cut the Teachers’ Memorial Global Studies Magnet Middle School from the project.

“During discussion, the rationale offered was that the committee believes, in good faith, that the project can now be completed within the $385 million originally passed at referendum,” Alderman Mark Bettencourt, chairman of the School Building Committee wrote to the City Council.

School board Chairman Mark Kulos wrote that the school board voted 7-0 recommending “no new bonding ordinances are required.”

The two boards learned a mathematical error had overestimated middle school enrollment, allowing the project to scale down the middle school renovation. The middle school cost was reduced from the $99 million estimate included in the 2022 referendum to $72.5 million if a new school is built or $69.27 million for extensive renovations.

The project also calls for building four new elementary schools. Designs for the first two buildings, the Greeneville and John B. Stanton schools, are too far along to revise. But the new Uncas and John Moriarty schools were reduced by 5,000 square feet each, cutting the cost projections to $74 million for Moriarty and $76 million for Uncas.

The School Building Committee will meet again Tuesday and is expected to vote to hire an enrollment demographer to generate updated enrollment projections, but the report is not expected until October, too late to plan for a new referendum.

The committee also scaled back the estimated $25 million renovations to the Samuel Huntington School for administrative offices and adult education. Since that is the last portion of the project, the committee plans to adjust the scope of the renovation based on remaining dollars at the time. The new projections would allow for $10.3 million for Huntington if a new middle school is built or $13.8 million if the group chooses the lower-cost renovated middle school.

Bettencourt said all the estimates are conservative, and the budget for each school building contains a cushion for unexpected costs. The overall budget has an additional $3.47 million for contingency.

Mayor Peter Nystrom, who proposed the reduced-scope new referendum question that eliminated the middle school, said Friday he remains skeptical that the project can be done within the $385 million approved by voters in 2022. But the council would need to vote by Sept. 3 to put any referendum question on the Nov. 5 ballot.

Nystrom said the recommendations by the building committee and school board are advisory, and the council has the final authority whether to seek a new referendum.

During the School Building Committee meeting on Thursday, member Peter Gauthier questioned whether the committee had enough information on the revisions to ensure the plans would provide equitable education and appropriately sized schools.

Michael Faenza, the city’s representative from the Consulting Solutions Group, said the 5,000-square-foot reductions can be done with minor changes to each space in the Uncas and Moriarty schools to sustain the same education programs available in all four new elementary schools.

“The idea of equity and understanding that the building committee feels so strongly about that,” Faenza said, “that was our prime concern in providing these new estimates.”

C.bessette@theday.com