You’re a construction manager for a major metro area elementary school district. You currently have three campus modernizations underway. It’s the middle of July, and those three campuses are completely gutted, stripped to the studs, currently unusable and ready for renovation. If they aren’t completed in the next 40 days, you’ll have nearly 3,000 students without a school, affecting many more thousands of parents and guardians.

What do you do?

If Balfour Beatty is your K-12 partner it turns out the answer is simply nothing. The work will be completed on schedule and with the highest standard of quality.

Since the late 1990s, Balfour Beatty’s education teams in California have repeatedly set the standard for breakneck-pace school construction and renovation for Chula Vista Elementary School District (CVESD), all while never compromising quality or client-first service. Through intentional relationship building, innovation in an ever-changing industry and repeated demonstrations of our expertise, we have served as CVESD’s Relentless Ally for nearly three decades and can deliver the same level of service to districts across the state.

 Proving Grounds

Balfour Beatty’s partnership with Chula Vista began with a bang. Initially engaged to build a new campus on an already accelerated schedule with estimated completion in October, our team was then asked if they could accelerate even further and finish by September. The district was experiencing explosive enrollment growth and needed a new campus now. Our team delivered in spades, working overtime and leveraging our logistics expertise to deliver the campus in time for the new school year.

From there, CVESD shifted focus to modernizing existing campuses, but was unsatisfied with the industry standard method – a logistical nightmare of work on occupied campuses, temporary classrooms and protracted disruptions.

“We earned a lot of trust with that first accelerated school project, so I told the assistant superintendent at the time that we could complete a modernization in just 72 days,” says Brian Cahill, then a senior project manager and now Balfour Beatty president in California. “With proactive design collaboration, alternative contracting methods and our fully dedicated teams, we had the resources and expertise to set a new bar for K-12 construction.”

The assistant superintendent’s response: “Could you do three at once?”

What might have seemed impossible on paper soon became a reality. In just one summer, Brian and the project team successfully completed three extensive campus modernizations, buildings all stripped to the studs at one point, and all turned over in time for the new school year just 72 days later.

In the following decades, Balfour Beatty has repeatedly met, raised and again exceeded our own standards. Every new project is an opportunity to set the bar even higher, pursuing better and better outcomes and schools for K-12 clients like CVESD. For many years, our team kept a consistent cadence of three summer campus modernizations (and often 1-2 ground-up campus projects during the rest of the year) for CVESD, each time striving to outdo the last.

“In all that time, our teams have never once missed a delivery date, maintained record low change order rates and generally provided an industry-leading experience for our partners at CVESD,” Brian adds. “We have repeatedly served our client by displaying an unparalleled commitment to collaboration and quality."

Collaboration and Communication

To date, that commitment has lasted nearly three decades, across scores of projects and many millions of dollars worth of work. Through supply chain challenges, economic downturns and even a pandemic, our record of success with CVESD remains unbroken. At every step, the relationship has been bolstered by our ability to communicate with transparency, operate with excellence and continually evolve our processes to suit the district’s changing needs.

In more recent years, our teams have begun leveraging the advantages of advanced virtual design and construction (VDC) tools to streamline project schedules and reduce budgets even further. Tools like three-dimensional laser scanning, particularly to accurately model existing conditions for an aging campus with unreliable as-built diagrams, can lead to less rework, less wasteful procurement and ultimately better outcomes.

“Some CVESD campuses we’ve modernized were first built as much as 50 years ago,” says California Vice President of Operations Michelle Reiner. “Some issues that come with age can’t be identified without tools like laser scanning unless you proceed with demolition, so VDC tools create an accurate picture of our destination so we can confidently plan a path to success.”

On many occasions, our CVESD project and support services teams have gone above and beyond to serve the district as Relentless Allies, even in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds.

Such was the case during the construction of two brand-new campuses, both served by the same electrical trade partner. By unfortunate circumstance, the trade partner entered bankruptcy while both projects were underway. But failure – or even delay – was simply not an option for our team.

Balfour Beatty President and CEO Eric Stenman, then serving the company as corporate counsel, stepped in. Against all odds, Eric secured a sufficient surety payment within 90 days of the trade partners’ bankruptcy (a nearly unheard-of feat), and our team quickly onboarded a new trade partner, immediately stressing the criticality of the mission and our standards of excellence.

“Electrical is nothing short of a do-or-die trade partner on any project, let alone a school with a set targeted opening date and potentially thousands of community members relying on that schedule,” Brian says. “Our team took the identity of ‘Relentless Ally’ to heart, doggedly pursued the right solutions and ultimately completed both schools on time.”

Situations like these may seem exceptional, but exceptional service is the way our teams approach every client relationship. Exceptional service is the reason why clients like CVESD trust our team’s expertise and advocacy.

“‘Collaboration’ isn’t just a buzzword for our teams, but the guiding principle for everything we do – we’re an open book with our clients,” Michelle adds. “We hold ourselves and our trade and design partners accountable for the best, client-first construction services in the industry, so our clients trust that we’re working in their best interests.”

National Expertise, Local Commitment

While Balfour Beatty builds decades of trust with local California clients like CVESD, the same principles undergird every Balfour Beatty project team from coast-to-coast. By sharing a client-first mindset, our teams are also best equipped to share their technical expertise across state and market sector lines, often to the benefit of national clients looking to expand or enhance their developments into our key operational areas.

With Chula Vista ESD, the proof is in longevity. It’s rare enough for a single contractor to serve a public school district for so long, and it’s not for lack of competition. Even as new administrators, new superintendents and new school board members have joined CVESD leadership, our team has repeatedly competed for its work and proven its quality as the premier K-12 builders in the state of California. CVESD and districts across the state expect the very best from Balfour Beatty because we’ve proven we accept no less.