Re-Elect Christenson, Scalzo, Walsh-Turner, McGregor and Modrak
Facilities
Our goals is to offer the best educational opportunities at the lowest possible cost. The plan that we've developed and put in motion helps us achieve that. Academics will be enhanced through more equal class sizes, consistent curriculum across class rooms and all-day kindergarten. Our finances will benefit from operating fewer buildings but, more importantly allow us to better utilize our people resources effectively.
Plan Summary
- Our facilities vision will include a new K-5 elementary school, a true middle school at IMS and the current high school.
- The facilities topic was a core part of our overall strategic plan that we started working on about 18 months ago with several committees consisting of parents, students, BP staff/administrators and board members.
- The plan related to facilities is an outcome of the strategic planning process to meet our academic and financial goals. Facilities are not the driver of the plan in any way.
Curriculum
- Our elementary schools need a consistent and integrated curriculum to achieve improved math and reading skills at the higher grade levels.
- Today there is a large variation in curriculum across the five buildings.
- The latest teacher contract contains a new procedure that ensures curriculum is developed to be consistent across classes, integrated throughout the grade levels and follow a transparent development/approval process.
- We also see advantages with a single building to deliver a higher concentration of STEM/technology throughout our curriculum.
Class Sizes
- The most common complaint in the Spring/Summer as we are evaluating staffing changes for the upcoming year is regarding class sizes.
- The number of elementary students tends to vary from 15 to 25 students (or more) per classroom. Those classrooms with more students and the variation in class sizes cause concern for some parents.
- Under the current facilities configuration, it's impractical to hire enough additional teachers to achieve an optimum class size of about 20 students per classroom.
- We can achieve that with a single building with our current staffing levels.
All-Day Kindergarten
- This is a high priority request from parents in the district that can't be provided with our current facilities due to space constraints.
- Additional staffing will be funded through the operational efficiency improvements.
Safety/Security
- Unfortunately, this is a risk that schools need to deal with today.
- A single building that is intentionally designed to deal with the security threats of today will be an improvement over our current facilities.
- Staffing buildings with armed AND unarmed security personnel will be both more economical and more consistent.
Renovation vs Build New
- Our current elementary buildings have not seen major renovations in decades and most of the major systems like HVAC, plumbing, electrical, windows, etc need to be replaced.
- Plus, ADA accessibility requirements have changed drastically since these older buildings were constructed and require significant investment to bring them up to code.
- We found that the cost to build new is about the same as renovating five buildings. But, the main problem with renovating five buildings is that we'd still have five old buildings that are not optimized for achieving our academic goals.
Operating Costs & Millage Impact
- We expect a net operating cost improvement of about $2.5-3 million per year due to savings in staff, utilities, and maintenance.
- Better utilization of special education resources will result in more effective services at a further reduced cost.
- Two thirds of our staff today will be retiring over the next 3-10 years.
- Hundreds of teachers at the top of the pay scale will be replaced by staff starting out at the bottom of the pay scale.
- This reduction of payroll costs will finance the facilities investments with minimal increase in the millage rate.
Schedule
- The current completion for our K-5 center is scheduled for August 2026.
- That is a one-year delay from our original plans due to the amount of work, available construction labor and costs.
- Most importantly, the cost for this project becomes much more favorable to our district with a delay as we are seeing recently inflated construction costs decrease and we expect that trend to continue. Overall, our community will benefit from both a lower construction costs and lower operating costs once this project is complete.
