Board to discuss update options at Nov. 14 meeting
Consultants working with the Fayetteville-Manlius School District Board of Education to develop a long-range facilities plan recently presented a range of options to the board that would address multiple facility needs.
The approaches include fixing only the identified infrastructure needs in each building without making programmatic enhancements to holistically rethinking school climate and culture and the programmatic needs of students for generations to come.
“You get to do this once every lifetime,” Superintendent Craig J. Tice said. “There’s no reason to rush.”
At an Oct. 24 board of education facilities committee meeting, representatives from the educational consulting firm School Leadership LLC reviewed with board members the firm’s K-12 Facilities Study report. The report outlines the process that consultants followed in developing recommendations for the board to consider in establishing a new long-range facilities plan for the district.
“You have some challenges ahead of you,” said Charles Fowler, School Leadership’s president. “I’m sure that those challenges will be easily met.”
The board previously commissioned the study to assess facility needs district wide and ensure students are learning in instructional spaces designed to best prepare students with the skills and knowledge needed for 21st century learning. The board next plans to prioritize a set of suggested criteria from School Leadership that the board will use to determine which projects are included in the new long-range plan and based on the community’s priorities.
The board plans to discuss the scope of the criteria at its Nov. 14 regular board meeting, which will be held 6:30 p.m. at Eagle Hill Middle School.
The consultants’ recommendations are based partially on the district’s 2015 state-required building condition survey report that highlighted the need for extensive work at three district buildings. If all of the identified maintenance work were completed at Wellwood Middle School and Enders Road Elementary School, the cost would be close to – or exceed – the cost of building new schools, according to the building condition survey. The cost estimates for projects identified in the report for F-M High School approximate more than a third of that building’s replacement value.
The F-M Board of Education had been wrestling with whether to renovate Wellwood Middle School or build a new school, but the building condition survey findings prompted the board to review all of the district’s facilities so that a comprehensive, cohesive and multi-year plan supported by the community could be developed.
School Leadership gathered additional input through numerous stakeholder focus groups, community forums, building walk-throughs and an online community survey. From this information, they developed a summary list of major needs by building.
Howard Smith, a School Leadership associate, told board members that the five approaches outlined in the final report could be taken as is or the board could use them as a launching point to develop its own plan based on the criteria board members establish. More importantly, possible programmatic changes may require rethinking the existing instructional spaces to accommodate the needs of future students and staff members, which would also affect the overall plan.
“There is some work that needs to be done regardless,” Smith said, noting that it will likely be at least two years – and possibly as many as five – before a project is complete due to the many steps involved in completing a major facilities project.
“We may be forced to address some of the infrastructure needs first to give our staff the necessary time to investigate the impact of instructional programs on future facility needs,” Tice said.
Online Community Survey Findings School Leadership developed an online survey that was available June 6 through Sept. 23 via the F-M district website. There were 410 respondents.
Survey participants were asked to offer their opinion on the priorities that they believed should drive decisions on which facility upgrades are most important. The five highest priorities (rated “Highest Priority” or “High Priority”) were:
∙Improving instructional spaces (72 percent)
∙Improving safety and security (71 percent)
∙Improving utilities (69 percent)
∙Improving building envelope/infrastructure (63 percent)
∙Ensuring a minimal local tax impact (54 percent)
The five lowest priorities (rated “Lowest Priority” or “No Priority”) were:
∙Valuing the historical importance of a particular building or school campus (34 percent)
∙Maintaining the neighborhood school concept for each village community (24 percent)
∙Improving exterior site work (21 percent)
∙Having sufficient space for future enrollments without having to change attendance
boundaries (16 percent)
∙Improving public common areas (auditoriums, gyms, libraries, offices) (12 percent)
More facilities planning information, as well as the complete survey results and the consultant’s final report, is available online at fmschools.org/facilities.
