Published: March 09, 2007 10:54 am      

All school options require new building

Members of Goshen schools’ feasibility task force are slowly whittling down options to address crowding at Goshen Middle School and facility needs at Goshen High School.

The task force has been meeting since December, and Thursday assessed the general desirability of four grade configuration options, each of which would require at least one new school building.

Members discussed the options in small groups and the results of those ratings will be discussed at the next meeting April 12.

The four grade configurations were:

• Kindergarten to sixth grade, seventh and eighth grade and ninth to 12th grade.

• Pre-kindergarten and kindergarten, first to sixth grades, seventh and eighth grades and ninth to 12th grades.

• Kindergarten to fourth grade, fifth and sixth grades, seventh and eighth grades and ninth to 12th grades.

• Kindergarten to fourth grade, fifth through eighth grades and ninth through 12 grades.

Members rated those four based on transportation cost, general fund impact, meeting enrollment projections, curriculum impact, adaptability of current buildings, cost and public perception/political impact.

Options 1, 2 and 3, which separate sixth-graders from seventh- and eighth-graders, present curriculum issues because of the electives middle schoolers are allowed where elementary students are not.

At the same time, options could be expanded for fifth-graders in options 3 and 4, said Dennis Cahill, vice president of planning for Odle McGuire Shook.

Kindergarten classrooms, at 1,200 square feet, are larger than standard classrooms and may present problems if they need to be converted to other uses. At the same time, adding those classrooms is more expensive.

At the next meeting, school officials and representatives from OMS will also have information on a fifth option, which would have the elementary buildings at either K-2 and 3-6 or K-3 and 4-6 based on the size of the current buildings.

By consensus, task force members effectively eliminated options that would make Goshen High School grades 10-12 or the elementary schools K-8.

In each scenario, renovations to the middle school cafeteria are included because of equipment and capacity issues.

Representatives from GHS listed some of the additions needed there, most in the music department, which will be examined in more detail at subsequent meetings.

Teacher Chad Collins asked that overall capacity be examined at GHS as well. Officials have focused on crowding at GMS, but as the younger grades grow, so will the high school, he said.

Room use analysis show that the middle school is at 81 percent capacity and GHS is at 78 percent.

The task force will discuss configuration options in more detail and their property tax impact at the next meeting.