MOUNT VERNON – Recent closures of Mount Vernon City Schools facilities exemplify why the district needs to restart conversations about facility improvements, supt. Bill Seder said during a special board work meeting March 12.
One of the district’s six elementary school buildings, Wiggin Street, closed March 10 and 11 because of a sewer line issue. Students switched to remote learning while a construction crew installed new piping, which involved digging out from the school to Brooklyn Street, Seder said.
Wiggin Street’s urgent facility need is one symptom of a larger district-wide problem with aging facilities, Seder said, pointing to assessments of MVCS in recent years that indicate the need for improvements across multiple buildings.
“We’ve continued to move our way up the Ohio Facilities Construction Commission ranking,” Seder said as an example.
OFCC is an arm of state government that guides capital projects for state agencies, state-supported universities and community colleges, including Ohio’s comprehensive public K-12 school construction and renovation program. MVCS has exceeded the 50% mark in its OFCC ranking, which it uses to determine which schools are next in line for funding assistance.
Discussion of master facility planning improvements for MVCS is not new.
Mount Vernon created a district facility grade card in 2018 indicating repairs were needed in at least one area in every building, as well as conducted an online facility “thought exchange” where 612 participants similarly expressed need for repairs across buildings. In 2019, the district directed this energy to the Education Gateway project, before the COVID-19 pandemic stymied master planning efforts.
Seder and the board intend to pick up where the district left off as pandemic restrictions drop and the building of an Intel’s manufacturing facility gears up.
“It just seems like the right time to start having the conversation again,” Seder said, which started during Saturday’s special board meeting with a presentation from an architectural firm.
Dan Obrynba, project executive for Fanning Howey, presented to the MVCS school board a possible master facility planning process.
The district has used Fanning Howey for other projects previously, so the architect is not new to the district nor unfamiliar with other districts in Knox County. For example, Centerburg’s school board received a similar presentation to the one given Saturday in July 2021 for a planning process to improve its facilities.
The special meeting served as a work session, so the board did not take any action Saturday but rather discussed ideas for moving the facility planning conversation forward.
What would the facility planning process look like with Fanning Howey?
Obrynba presented on the “here to there” process, what it would take to get from the district’s current operations through the completion of facility projects.
“We try not to identify what ‘there’ looks like too early in the process,” Obrynba said. “We know it’s about facilities and that sort of thing, but we try not to jump to any conclusions, because we want this process to lead us to the right conclusion that fits the community.”
The process Fanning Howey uses involves four steps: collecting information, connecting with stakeholders, creating options and completing with confidence.
Step 1: Collecting Information
Some examples of information collected during the first step include historical facilities data, enrollment projections, facilities assessments (specifically Fanning Howey validating OFCC assessments), researching site conditions and establishing an educational vision.
Step 2: Connecting with Stakeholders
Several committees would be created for this step, one of which is a facilities core committee, which is a small advisory group of six to eight people including the superintendent, one to two board members, the facilities director, treasurer, and one to two community leaders.
A larger group, the facilities advisory committee, would bring more of the community into the process. The FAC would have 40-80 people, ranging from administrators, board members (two at maximum), teachers, parents, community leaders, business leaders and school clubs/organizations.
Obrynba said less than 50% of the FAC should be district employees.
Board member Mary Rugola-Dye asked about including current students in the FAC, which Obrynba said has happened on occasion.
“I think the teachers know, but also the children know ‘this has not worked for me,’” Rugola-Dye said of facility problems.
Board president Margie Bennett also said during previous times of facility improvements, the people who work in school buildings have been key to both garnering public interest and understanding current deficiencies.
“When we built the middle school, the teachers were the driving force,” Bennett said as an example.
Two teachers attended the meeting Saturday — seventh grade social studies teacher April Thompson and high school math teacher Darcy Nesbit, who both voiced that they see a need for facility improvements in their respective buildings.
Regarding the possible future planning process with Fanning Howey, the number of committee meetings can vary. Obrynba said a typical schedule will include six FAC meetings as well as two community meetings open to the general public.
Each of these meetings would serve different purposes.
For example, the first FAC meeting would primarily be to provide information to committee members, such as current site plans, historical and project enrollment data and OFCC Funding. The first meeting would also provide opportunities for initial feedback, such as establishing whether there is actually a need to upgrade and determining if the district should team with OFCC.
The second FAC meeting generally involves building tours.
“We want to make sure they see it first-hand,” Obrynba said of the FAC. “Think about this large group out in the community talking about, ‘Hey, this is what we’re doing.’ If somebody says, ‘Hey, have you even seen the building?’ and they say no, then they’ve lost some credibility.”
The second meeting is also a time to rank needs and obstacles, which can be done through “dot exercises,” where people place red dots on the type of spaces they would not want and green dots on the types of spaces they would want.
Obrynba often sees more support for transitional and transformational organizational models through dot exercises, as opposed to traditional classroom configurations. Transitional and transformational models allow for more connectivity between classrooms and collaborative work spaces.
Step 3: Creating Options
The third meeting typically involves reviewing committee survey results from the previous meeting and beginning to create options, followed by a fourth meeting going through master plan scenarios and ultimately selecting top scenarios.
Community meetings typically occur between the final few FAC meetings.
During the first meeting with the community, project background is shared and master plan options as well as financing options are discussed. The meeting also includes discussion time for questions and feedback.
“If we need some course adjustment, then we can do that before the second (community meeting),” Obrynba said.
The FAC’s fifth meeting typically follows the first community meeting, allowing committee members to review the feedback form the community meeting and make revisions to the master plans.
The second community meeting serves as a chance to reach solution consensus, before the sixth FAC meeting, when committee members will prepare a master plan and bond issue financing recommendation to the board of education.
Step 4: Completing with Confidence
“We’re trying to create as much ownership as we can,” Obrynba said of connecting with stakeholders to throughout the planning process.
“Ultimately, you’re going to be asking for support through an election, and if you don’t create that ownership, you probably won’t get the support.”
Some ESSER funds could potentially be used for the planning purposes of master facility projects, but because those funds need to be used by 2024.
Based on other district’s planning processes, it would likely take a year to complete all the steps outlined above involved in creating a facility plan, and then years to execute the projects thereafter.
“This is about future planning,” Seder said, “not necessarily next week’s plan.”
While Saturday’s presentation shows Seder and the board see a need for facility improvements, ultimately the decision will be up the community, Seder said.
