Anatomy of a state-funded special school, reconstructed entirely from the public record — the 30 prime contracts advertised in a single bid package, the two scopes that had to be re-bid, the 23 firms the state award notice names, and the pre-bid schedule that runs from a November 2025 bid opening to a January 2028 first day of school.
The Colonial School District is replacing the John G. Leach School — a county-wide public school for children and young adults from age 3 to 21 who live with physical disabilities, moderate-to-severe cognitive disabilities or serious health impairments — with a new single-story building on farmland at 2460 Bear Corbitt Road. It is being delivered the way Delaware delivers most public buildings: construction management — agency, with the district holding every prime contract itself. The pre-bid agenda says it in five words: all prime contracts with CSD.
The district's construction manager is EDiS Company of Wilmington. The design is by StudioJAED Architects & Engineers of Bear, which also carries the mechanical, electrical and fire-protection engineering; Baker, Ingram & Associates is the structural engineer, Site Studios the civil engineer, and a Lancaster, Pennsylvania pool consultant, WalloverArchitects, designed the therapy pool. The contract form is the AIA A132–2019 owner–contractor agreement, construction-manager-as-adviser edition, with A232–2019 general conditions. Bids are processed through the school districts' shared Data Service Center, which is why the solicitations sit on the state's bid portal under the Colonial code.
Contracts run from the owner. Because every trade contract is held by the district, each one is a public document: the advertisement, the addenda and the state award notice are all on the state's bid-document server. What is not public is the drawing set — the district filed a plan-publication exemption under 29 Del. C. §10002, so biddable drawings are released only through the construction manager's plan room after a plans request. This file is built from what is published.
Unlike the Newark library, which was bought in five sequential packs plus a late audio-visual package, this school went to market almost all at once: thirty prime contracts in a single Bid Package A, advertised 2025-09-29 with documents dated 2025-10-15. Two scopes did not survive that round and were re-bid as Package B in January 2026; the landscaping contract is being re-bid a third time now, as Package C. The rows below are what the public record names.
| CONTRACT | TRADE | STATUS / KEY DATES |
|---|---|---|
| BID PACKAGE A · ADVERTISED 2025-09-29 · PRE-BID 2025-10-21 · OPENED 2025-11-19 (MOVED FROM 11-12 BY ADDENDUM 2) · 5 ADDENDA · CONTRACTS EFFECTIVE 2026-02-08 | ||
| A-01 | Sitework | |
| A-02 | Landscaping | not carried by the Package A award; landscaping re-advertised as C-02 in August 2026 |
| A-03 | Concrete | |
| A-04 | Masonry | |
| A-05 | Structural steel & miscellaneous metals | |
| A-06 | Carpentry and general work | |
| A-07 | Roofing | |
| A-08 | Waterproofing | |
| A-09 | Exterior metal panels | |
| A-10 | Joint sealants | |
| A-11 | Hollow metal and finish hardware | |
| A-12 | Glass and glazing | |
| A-13 | Metal studs and drywall | |
| A-14 | Casework and millwork | re-bid as B-14 in Package B (January 2026) |
| A-15 | Ceramic tile | |
| A-16 | Acoustical ceilings | |
| A-17 | Paint and VWC | |
| A-18 | Flooring | |
| A-19 | Fluid-applied flooring | |
| A-20 | Window treatments | |
| A-21 | Kitchen equipment | |
| A-22 | Swimming pools | a therapy pool inside a school — shotcrete shell, dedicated piping, pumps and water treatment |
| A-23 | Fire protection | |
| A-24 | Plumbing | plumbing, one of eight building-systems contracts |
| A-25 | Mechanical | mechanical — HVAC for a single-story, 65,000 sq ft plan |
| A-26 | Building management systems | controls tie the mechanical and electrical packages together |
| A-27 | Electrical | re-bid as B-26 in Package B (January 2026) |
| A-28 | Special systems | |
| A-29 | Structured cabling | |
| A-30 | Testing, adjusting and balancing | |
| BID PACKAGE B (RE-BIDS) · DOCS 2025-12-30 · PRE-BID 2026-01-07 · OPENED 2026-01-28 · 3 ADDENDA · CONTRACTS EFFECTIVE 2026-04-30 | ||
| B-14 | Casework and millwork (re-bid) | bid form revised by Addendum 3 to add allowance language |
| B-26 | Electrical (re-bid) | same revision; two firms named on the Package B award notice |
| RE-BID BID PACKAGE C · ADVERTISED 2026-08-21 · PRE-BID 2026-08-26 · ADDENDUM 1 2026-08-21 · BIDS DUE 2026-09-24 3:00 P.M. · OPEN NOW | ||
| C-02 | Landscaping (re-bid) | topsoil testing and amendment, permanent seeding and stabilization, plant material, sod, mulch; pollution insurance $1M/$3M; a $5,000 CM allocation; no alternates on this bid form |
Who won Package A. The state award notice, posted 2026-08-11, names twenty-three firms. It does not say which contract each firm holds, and it carries no dollar amounts — those are approved in the district's board record. The firms, as listed:
Who won Package B. The notice posted 2026-08-24 lists B & M Partition, Inc. (Bellmawr, NJ) and Shields Electric Inc (Wilmington) under a summary of electrical and casework work; it does not map firm to contract.
Honesty rail. The advertisement lists thirty contracts, A-01 to A-30; the pre-bid agenda lists twenty-nine and omits the window-treatments line, so its numbering shifts after A-19 — which is why the electrical re-bid is numbered B-26. Twenty-three firms for thirty contracts does not mean seven contracts went unawarded: a firm may hold more than one. What this file does not hold: contract values, the firm-to-contract map, the drawings, and any bid tabulation. Each is either behind a login or not yet published; none has been guessed.
Three completion dates live in the record: a 2026–27 school year in 2024 press coverage, complete by summer 2027 on the October 2025 pre-bid agenda, and a 2028-01-18 first day of school on the pre-bid construction schedule bound into the Package C manual. Public schedules move — this page shows all three and dates each one.
Read the trade list and the building appears. A swimming-pools contract inside a school means a therapy pool — the specification carries its own pool division, shotcrete shell, exposed-aggregate finish, dedicated pool piping, pumps and water treatment, and a pool consultant on the design team. A greenhouse-details sheet, an adapted-physical-education plan and a kitchen-equipment contract describe a program built around daily life skills, not lecture halls. Eight of the thirty contracts — fire protection, plumbing, mechanical, building management, electrical, special systems, structured cabling, and testing and balancing — are building systems: for a single-story school for medically fragile children, the air, water and power are most of the building.
A single-story plan of 65,000 square feet on a 19-acre parcel, with its own DelDOT entrance off Bear Corbitt Road — the same route the school's buses will use under a covered drop-off built so that children in wheelchairs never board in the rain.
FROM THE PRE-BID AGENDA, THE CIVIL DRAWING LIST AND THE CONSTRUCTION MANAGER'S PROJECT PAGEEvery contractor on this job works under the state's Building Construction prevailing-wage determination effective 2026-03-13, bound into the Package C manual — the same rates in our prevailing-wage lookup. The advertisement also requires the OMB drug-testing program, a craft-training affidavit under 29 Del. C. §6962, and registration under the Contractor Registration Act.
This is the rare Delaware school built with no local share. Leach is a county-wide special school, and the record describes the funding as exclusively state money:
About $37.5 million, allocated in the FY2025 Bond and Capital Improvements Act (June 2024) after a 2021 commitment; the district has described the approved project as a $40 million school. Authorization runs through the Department of Education's Certificate of Necessity process.
No local share is reported for this school. The district's other capital projects — two middle schools, two elementary schools and William Penn High School — carry the usual 60/40 state–local split, with state investment scheduled into 2029.
Not published in the state award notices, which name firms only. Award amounts are approved in the district's board record, which sits behind a login-gated agenda portal. This file does not estimate them.
We could not locate the Certificate of Necessity document for this school on the Department of Education's current page, which lists only FY2027 approvals; the Colonial certificates we did read (CN 2507 C and 2507 L, FY2025) cover William Penn High School and Wilbur Elementary and are linked below as the form of the instrument, not as this project's certificate. If a reader holds the Leach certificate, this page wants it.
Everything above traces to these documents, all public, all fetched and read on 2026-09-07: