School district officials consider expansion, new building to deal with overcrowding

Published 8:18 am Thursday, March 3, 2011

Although no plans have been decided, an expansion or new school building could be in the works for Austin Public Schools.

After reviewing 23 plans on how to solve projected enrollment increases, all of which include an expansion or new school, the district’s facilities task force decided Wednesday night to let school administrators create several options based on task force input to present at the committee’s next meeting.

“This is a real complex problem,” said Mark Stotts, the district’s finance and operations director. “There is no clear cut solution.”

Email newsletter signup

The task force came up with the 23 options during a small group session two weeks ago, taking into account projected enrollment increases. The group was told to think of solutions that didn’t take costs into account and to lay as many options on the table they could think of.

The solutions the group came up with varied from switching grades around to putting kindergarten back into elementary schools to building new schools, adding onto current schools and more. None of the task force members could decide on any one option; however, everyone agreed school officials needed to examine the options to see which ones would most benefit students.

Emerging Trends

After reviewing these options Wednesday, several themes emerged.

Chief among those themes was the clear sense that an expansion or a possible new school would be part of the answer to the district’s problems.

“Based on our student size, the size of the classes that (Austin) has, that’s the only option,” said Peggy Young, one of the committee members and a training and development coordinator at Riverland Community College. “The extent to which we need to do that is what’s in question. Then it becomes a case of what do we need versus what do we want.”

There are other ideas the task force agrees on, such as the importance of an all-day kindergarten program and a heavy emphasis on technology. Several of the task force-created options would have either switched Sumner Elementary School, a decades-old school, to an early childhood care center or closed the school down, due to the costs of constantly retrofitting the building for classroom technology.

“I think it will definitely be a consideration,” Stotts said about examining Sumner’s retrofitting costs. “If we’re not able to (retrofit a building for education), then I think we have to examine potentially repurposing the building or doing something else with it.”

Any solution will have to be cost efficient, according to task force members. Above all, any potential expansion or building has to be the best solution for education.

“It can’t be just about adding space, it has to be space that makes Austin Public Schools a better school system,” said Jeff Kritzer, school board and task force member. “It can’t be space just (because) we need more space.”

The Next Step

District officials will create several options to present to the task force members for their consideration at the next meeting on March 16. They’ll take the input and themes they’ve gleaned from task force solutions and feedback to come up with the best possible approaches, Stotts said.

It was important for the community to see the realities school districts face before administrators stepped in to help the process, according to District Superintendent David Krenz. If administrators had simply come up with options and presented them, Krenz and other school officials believe the district would have gone nowhere. It’s only by involving the community and having residents realize the district’s needs that a feasible solution would be possible, according to school officials.

“We’ve got a group of people who see the same things we saw,” Krenz said. “If we wouldn’t have had this, they wouldn’t have understood it.”

This group will present a recommendation to the district board by its May meeting, possibly giving a presentation at the April special session. Although district officials would have like a recommendation by April’s board meeting, the task force has much more work to do, which means the committee will have at least one more meeting past their original mid-March deadline. The board and the district will hopefully have the summer to further research and perform cost-benefit analysis to see whether the task force’s recommendation would work. The board and district will also consider if the recommendation is in line with the district’s five-year strategic plan.

The school board has until September to accept or work out another plan, as the board has the final decision on whatever solution the district implements. September is the latest a proposal can be approved by the board, in case the district has to put forth a levy referendum to the community to pay for whatever solution is approved, according to Krenz.

Come what may, it will ultimately be up to more residents than are on the task force to decide how the district will evolve.

“These schools are theirs,” Krenz said. “They’re not mine, they’re theirs and they need to be a part of the direction they will go.