While the enrollment in public schools throughout the southwest has been growing, the funding for new school construction has not. Many small and mid-sized rural school districts often have over crowded classrooms but because of the difficulties in passing school bond elections and several years of flat property tax revenues, they do not have the funds necessary to build new schools. However, Ramtech has an answer for many districts that find themselves in this situation, and it starts with our Accelerated Building System, a permanent modular construction process that provides quality facilities with up to a 25% cost savings and a substantially shorter construction timeline.
Ramtech’s Accelerated Building System has become the country’s premier offsite-manufactured permanent building process. The ABS method takes factory assembled modular sections with attached ceilings and walls – but no floor – and sets them directly onto a conventional concrete slab foundation. This allows the concrete slab to become the floor of the structure just like a site-built building. We then site apply all of the exterior and interior finishes including textured and painted sheetrock, vinyl wallpaper, or ceramic tile on the walls and floors to provide a finished look identical to site construction. For the exterior, finishes can be as simple as steel siding or as architecturally pleasing as the combination of brick or rock masonry and stucco. When it’s all put together, the factory-controlled offsite manufacturing ABS process results in a superior quality structure with less site disruption while also providing for a greener, more energy efficient school building.
The development of the Accelerated Building System product and process grew out of Ramtech’s long history as a full-service design-build construction firm working with both public and private schools and colleges in the Southwest. Our previous public school customers in Texas include the Arlington, Alief, Blue Ridge, Hubbard, Leggett, and Mexia Independent School Districts, and higher institution clients such as the University of Texas System, Texas A&M, Texas Christian University, and Clary Sage College in Oklahoma. We have also provided permanent schools to federal agencies and the military including Child Development Centers for the U.S. Corps of Engineers and the U.S. Navy. A sample of our project portfolio can be seen here on our website at RamtechModular.com/project-profiles.
In every case, all of Ramtech’s Accelerated Building System modular building projects were completed faster and for less total cost when compared to what traditional construction using the design-bid-build delivery method would have yielded. Using the ABS process, a projects total scope of work including the design, site development, and building completion typically costs between $100-150 per square foot and takes 4-8 months to complete. Ramtech also provides at no cost to the school (and prior to entering into a contract) a preliminary floor plan, site plan layout, color rendering, and a preliminary budget for the project.
