Q+A about Renovation and Moving Plans for the Elementary Schools

The members of the Forestdale Reorganization Planning Team have submitted questions about many of the details of the reorganization of the elementary Schools, as well as about the FY16 Budget that supports the reorganization.   We are publishing three Q+A articles generated from the RPT’s questions: this one about the renovation; one about the budget; one about the Wing School closure.

Q: When will the work start on the schools/portables?  Will it be done in time for the new school year? Will there be contingencies in the contracts with outside vendors to complete the work in time?  Will this incur any additional ‘rush’ costs?

• Work on the portables can begin after the Articles are approved on February 9th.
• The work will be done in time for the new school year.
• The district will follow state procurement law with the requirement that all work will be completed on time

Q: Is the work needing to be done specifically needed to accommodate the reconfiguration?

• The portables would be renovated under either reconfiguration plan. That is, if we had two K-6 schools we would need to renovate the portables; and with a PreK school and a Gr 3-6 school we would need to renovate the portables. The portables were used up until the start of this year and currently have some limited use. They do need a facelift and have a usable life of 8-10 years.
• The bathroom work ($25,000) was first mentioned as a need specific to the PreK-2 model. but would have occurred in any reconfigured model to accommodate the Integrated Pre-school and Spinnaker which would have been located in only one of the schools.

Q: I understand that it will cost nearly $160k+ to fix the portables.  Why do need them? How much longer of a life do they have?

• The portables have another 8-10 years and will provide excellent usable space for school programs. Tear down costs verses the gains in usable life for programs makes this a good investment.
• You can read an article that describes the portables – with lots of photos – here.

Q: When will all the students be out of Wing?

• The K-6 students will close out the Wing school on the last day of school in June.
• Some pre-school or Spinnaker students who attend special summer programs will stay in their space until their summer programs wrap up in August.

Q: What is/Is there a plan to move the SPINNAKER kids out? When will their plan be finalized and communicated to their families?

• The Spinnaker classes will move to Forestdale School. Some Spinnaker students who attend special summer programs will stay at Wing until they wrap up in August but when they return to school in September, it will be to Forestdale. The Pupil Services department will handle the communication with parents.