Two schools plan to expand

Posted: Jan. 10, 2012

Two Hamilton elementary schools are running out of space, a report from the School District said on Jan. 3, and the School Board may move as quickly as next week to remedy the issue.

Woodside and Marcy Elementary Schools are exceeding their capacity, Assistant Superintendent Bryan Ruud told the Board at the Jan. 3 meeting. Woodside was originally designed to house about 600 kids, but its current enrollment sits at 674. Ruud said the school has seen enrollments as high as 700, but the school's population is currently trending flat or even downward. Four temporary classrooms were erected at Woodside eight years ago to handle excess students. Those classrooms, the village said last year, must be gone by the end of 2014.

Marcy Elementary, the District's fastest-growing school, was designed for 500 students. Its enrollment currently sits at approximately 525 students.

Ruud presented the School Board with options ranging from doing nothing, to redistricting, or even building a new school. But the Board seemed most receptive to the idea of making additions to Marcy and Woodside, an option the district said could be funded within the framework of its current operating budget.

Knowing that the portable classrooms will be gone from Woodside in a few years, the District will lose approximately 100 students worth of class space. Doing nothing, while possible, said Ruud, would probably not be an ideal solution. That option would require the District to move some kids out of Woodside and into other schools like Lannon Elementary, where some space exists. The assistant superintendent said parents would hate having students shuffled around, and it would remove all future flexibility.

Said Ruud, "Now Lannon's full, Woodside's full, and we have yet to address Marcy's problem. They're still a problem, and Maple's at pretty much capacity. All our flexibility is gone, and we've probably made no one happy. So we're not really recommending that, but it's an option."

Redistricting, he said, poses the same problems.

A third option, building a new middle school, represents the best long-term solution, Ruud told the School Board, but with a cost estimated at $25 to $30 million, it would also be the most expensive and speculative solution.

"That's a significant expenditure, probably the biggest long-term solution," he said at the meeting, indicating that the school could build a fifth and sixth grade middle school and house seventh- and eighth-graders at Templeton Middle School.

"But it might be a solution in search of a problem, because if we do see a flattening enrollment, we've added all this class space and all that overhead that's going to come with it. And maybe we flatten out and now we've got really kind of half-empty schools."

The solution the District will likely recommend to the School Board at a Jan. 12 Facility Advisory Committee meeting is additions to Marcy and Woodside.

Estimated at roughly a $2 million investment in each school, the $4 million project would not require a district referendum. The School District said it would fund the additions partially through its maintenance budget and partially from the District fund balance.

If the advisory committee signs off on the proposal, the Board of Education could take action on the additions the following week. The School District would like to move ahead on the project as soon as possible because of the favorable borrowing climate that exists right now. Their hope was to begin work on the additions sometime this spring with final designs approved in March.

District representatives presented a preliminary design for each school at the Jan. 3 meeting. At Marcy, the plan called for a six-classroom addition with the addition of a multi-purpose room or "flex space." The multi-purpose room would be built where two current classrooms sit, while the six new classrooms would become a brand new addition to the school - a net gain of four classrooms. Woodside would receive two additions, a 1500-square-foot multi-purpose room and a five-classroom addition to replace the four temporary classrooms the school currently uses - a net gain of one classroom.

"We're really not going to be making Woodside much bigger. We're just going to be handling our existing enrollment," Ruud said.

Each multi-purpose room could be used for various overflow needs.

At Marcy it would be used as conference space, cubicles, and other small group services. Woodside's multi-purpose room would be used for overflow band and gym classes.

After hearing the proposal, Board member Lynn Kristensen said, "I think it's the viable way to go. There is no way in this economy that we can even think about a referendum."

She added, "We can't leave it as is. I've been in Marcy. If we have to wait on ordering some things, I think that's what we have to do, because these kids cannot continue to be mushed and moved and displaced."

The plan does not ask for anything more than the District needs, Kristensen said, adding that the School District did the right thing by building temporary classrooms at Woodside eight years ago.

"We gave it the time to see, is this (growing enrollment) real? Or is it going to move through? It's real," she said.

Despite some schools in the Hamilton School District seeing enrollment numbers flattening in recent years, the district as a whole continues to grow, and it continues to attract more former private school students and open-enrollment students.

"We are continuing to grow when neighboring districts are declining enrollment," said Superintendent Kathleen Cooke.

Ruud also pointed out that several subdivisions within the School District have not seen much in the way of home turnover in recent years.

"Once that changes, I think there's a lot of pent-up demand between the Baby-Boomers retiring…I think there's going to be a lot of rollover in these houses. I don't think you want to be sitting here at that point with no flexibility."

Pursuing the two additions preserves the School District's flexibility, officials said, because Maple Avenue Elementary is near its capacity and Lannon Elementary has room for some additional enrollment growth.

While conceding that beginning the project this spring represents an ambitious timeline, the projects could be completed sometime in the middle or toward the end of the 2012-13 school year. Ruud said ideally construction on each addition would begin simultaneously, but the District could possibly bid each school one at a time.

"I just don't know of a better bidding environment right now. If we miss that I think we'll kick ourselves," he said.

The District's Facility Advisory Committee will meet at 6:30 p.m. in the Hamilton High School media center to discuss the issue.