School district will move forward on bond proposal

The Mountain Home School District will move forward with plans to seek a major bond to expand the junior high and turn it into a grades 9-12 high school.

Meeting last week the district's board of trustees formally accepted the recommendation of its citizen advisory committee, formed last fall, to seek a bond in the $25-33 million range. The committee suggested three items as top priority in the design of the expansion:

1) Expansion of the academic classrooms. As currently envisioned, the plan calls for a second wing on the junior high with 56 additional classrooms.

2) Including an auditorium in the school's expansion, that could be used by the community as well as students.

3) A major expansion of facilities for vocational technical programs in the school district.

Those priorities may be slightly reorganized as the district begins looking at designs. School Board Chairman Jim Alexander said that facilities that fit the curriculum needs of the students, such as the classrooms and vo-tech expansion, have to be the district's first concern.

If an auditorium would be included in the final plans, he said for example, "it would have to be something that was used more than just three or four times a year. It would have to be something that would support the curriculum," that could be used daily for district band, music and theater programs, for example.

In accepting the citizen group's recommendation the board agreed only to proceed with the bond, tentatively expected to go to the voters some time after school starts next fall, but it did not make any decision regarding the actual size of the bond or any specific details of the expansion plan.

"Now, the real work starts," said Alexander.

Don Hutchinson, who designed the new library, has been contracted by the district to begin the preliminary design and cost estimates for the expansion project. Alexander said the public would be kept informed as the design proceeds and its input would be sought prior to any key decisions being made regarding what should be included and what should be dropped in the public's and district's "wish list" for the building.

He said preliminary estimates showed that the academic and vo-tech portions of the expansion project, Phase II of the original junior high/high school plan, would cost the district approximately $25 million. That estimate includes a "competition gym" required by the state for a high school, currently envisioned as being able to seat about 3,000 people, making it large enough to handle indoor graduation ceremonies if necessary.

The auditorium recommended by the citizen's committee would push the cost up by several million dollars more, depending on its design.

"Right now," Alexander said, "I'm not sure there's much of an agreement on what an auditorium would be. Would it be 300 seats, to handle things like band and choral concerts, or 3,000 seats for major events like a graduation? That's the sort of thing we have to work out, with the public's help." He noted that the district has always made its facilities available to the public, so a facility like an auditorium needs to take that aspect of its use into design considerations as well. "Is it going to be a tent, or the Morrison Center?" he asked. "I think right now everyone has a different vision of what this auditorium will do," and that's one point where the district will be seeking public input before any final design is put together.

But in the end, Alexander said, the main focus of the bond has to be on what the expansion would do for the students. "We're in the academic business," he said.

Besides the additional classrooms, Alexander said one of the major areas of academic growth in the school district is in the vo-tech programs, which right now are in such demand that some students must be turned away.

Those programs, Alexander said, are a vital part of the district's curriculum. The auto mechanics, welding and home building trades programs, for example, provide students who don't intend on going on to college skill sets that they can use to enter the workforce as soon as they graduate. "We recognize that we have got to expand those programs," Alexander said. Academic programs are important, he said, but in any Phase II expansion of the junior high into a high school, "everybody deserves a place at the table."

As currently envisioned, the district would move the vo-tech programs at the current high school annex into the buildings currently used by the district maintenance staff (which would then move its operations into the annex).

The district maintenance building is located adjacent to the current junior high campus and could be remodeled and expanded relatively cheaply in order to provide for an expansion of the vo-tech programs.

Alexander also stressed that the auditorium and academic/vo-tech aspects of the project have to be designed for the long term.

"We want people to be as excited about this 20 years from now as they are today. We have to build this for the future," so the district doesn't fall into the trap common in the Meridian School District of constructing a building and then, the day it opens, needing another one.

"We have to find that balance between our needs today, and our needs down the road," he said.

That's one of the reasons the citizen's committee is going to continue to be an important part of the design process, he said. "We're going to ask them to look ten years down the road. We don't want to come back to the taxpayers in ten years and say it wasn't big enough. We want to build it big enough, but not overbuild it."

Although enrollment on base has been declining for the last 6-8 years, enrollment in town has begun to rise with the ongoing growth of the community. Currently, the growth in town represents approximately 100 students, or about four classrooms, per year, and Alexander said it doesn't look like that growth is going to be slowing down any time soon.

The district currently has a bonding capacity of $38 million, but doesn't want to push any Phase II bond past $33 million, at the most, because it wants to retain enough capacity to build down the road, an additional grade school, if and when that becomes necessary to meet the district's growth.

Alexander said by creating a high school out of the current junior high, and including the ninth grade in the high school, the district can reorganize its other buildings for maximum efficiency and take some of the growth pressure off them for a while.

Besides the additional classroom wing, expanded vo-tech facilities, competition gym and an auditorium, the bond also would have to cover costs for ancillary facilities. The Phase II expansion would include widening 18th Street, adding about 2300 feet of curb, gutter and sidewalk, and expansion of the parking lot to be able to accommodate about 600 vehicles. The district also would push the state to put in a traffic light at 18th Street and American Legion, where it anticipates most of the traffic congestion would occur.

Alexander said he didn't expect a decision on design and cost to be made until probably May, and the project will be fine-tuned during the summer. Between now and then, he said, community input is going to be vital in helping put together the final design. The district will be making presentations throughout the community to solicit input, will be accepting written and phoned in comments, and any citizen that would like to serve on the advisory committee should contact Supt. Tim McMurtrey at the school district's administrative offices.

Alexander said that "what is driving this entire move is not only student numbers, but also the need to improve education, and we need the proper facilities to do that."

He added that "it is crucial for us to put the ninth grade in with the 10-12 (grades) so they're all earning (high school) credits together." That will make for a more efficient use of staff and improved opportunities for students, as well as allow the district to greatly improve its ability to offer "remediation" programs for students who fall behind.

"In the end, it's all about what is best for the students. The committee felt this was the best way to go, and we agree," he said. "In order to even begin to reach the goals of the No Child Left Behind Act, we have to do this.

"We need the facilities. Because even if they don't go on to college, today's kids have to be better trained than ever. They deserve the opportunity to get the best they have to offer, and we have an obligation to educate these kids at the highest level we possibly can."

The current junior high was originally designed to become a high school, after a second -- Phase II -- bond would be approved by the voters.

When the district first built the junior high just over ten year ago it was experiencing considerable growth, which it anticipated would justify the Phase II portion of the high school/junior high project in just a few years. But almost from the day the new building opened the district's enrollment flattened out for several years, then began a slow decline that only recently has begun to be reversed.

Much of that decline occurred on base, where the student population there has dropped by nearly 1,000 students in the last ten years. As a result, the district has slowly been closing schools on base, moving students into town to save on administrative costs. Currently only the base primary school is operation, although all the other schools have merely been mothballed, in the event base numbers begin rising again. Because of security considerations, it's impractical to bus students from town to the base.

But if the number of school-age children on base has been declining, due to a variety of factors, the number of students in the town schools has begun to grow again, after nearly a decade of decline, prompted primarily by the massive housing boom underway in the district. More than 1,400 new homes have been built in the area in the last 18 months alone.

That's put considerable pressure on some of the schools to handle the growth, and prompted the school district to look at reorganizing to make the best use of its buildings while continuing to provide a quality education for the students.

At the time it was built the current junior high cost $85 per square foot. Today, as construction costs have skyrocketed since then, the costs for public facilities now run around $200 a square foot, meaning the additions to the junior high that would be required to turn it into a high school housing grades 9-12 would more than double the cost of the original bond.

In November Supt. Tim McMurtrey put together a large committee of more than 30 people representing a broad cross section of the community to review and make recommendations on five options the district was considering to reorganize the schools in town. The committee looked at those options, discussed several more, and eventually reached a consensus on what it felt was the best solution to meet the district's long-term needs -- making the recommendation last week for completion of Phase II.