Construction on Elementary School No. 49 in the master-planned community of Harvest Green will pick up where it left off in August. Fort Bend ISD trustees approved a new, larger contract for Drymalla Construction Company on Monday, after the previous agreement was suspended.

Construction on the two-story, 123,440-square-foot school, which is being constructed west of Travis High School, stopped after district staff realized the project bid was improperly advertised before being awarded.

By Texas law, requests for bids on school construction contracts valuing more than $50,000 must be advertised once per week for two weeks in a newspaper of general circulation in the county. FBISD did not meet this requirement for the original contract, according to Oscar Perez, FBISD executive director of design and construction.

Drymalla’s original contract was for $27.6 million, but the board of trustees approved a $32.2 million contract at its meeting Monday. The overall project budget increased from $33.7 million to $38.7 million, and work is still expected to be complete in July 2017.

“The additional cost to do this is, what we’re requesting is approximately $4.9 million,” Perez said. “Included in that is the downtime that we’ve had with this month … the money is going to recover that.”

A majority of ES No. 49 students will come from Oakland Elementary School in Richmond, which FBISD Superintendent Charles Dupre said is currently over capacity. The district did not want to transfer students during the semester.

“We bid this as an October completion date to get the [12-month] construction cycle,” Dupre said. “We thought there would be disruption to the learning environment and families as we tried to transition mid-year.”

Drymalla was the only company to bid on the project when FBISD reopened its request for proposals on Sept. 6. As a result, Perez said the district could present a bid for approval one week earlier than the Sept. 19 deadline which was originally set.