05/27/2025 Special Board Meeting

001And I think it taken a like a a relaxing approach yesterday was going to be good enough, but I uh I overdid my physical exertion two days in a row and not used to that kind of work anymore. And now your body's just feeling like a noodle. It's tired. I'm not mentally tired. I'm physically tired. It's been a long time since I've been physically tired and not mentally tired. Usually I'm mentally tired. My body's so like, "What are you doing? Let's go. Let's go for a walk or something." I'm like, "No, tired." And now it's the afterward. I'm like, "Gosh, I could go for a walk and get some of this off my mind." Nope. You're tired. Like everything would just all kind of work together. Oh, the guy is doing some cleaning up in

002some woods. Oh, that's nice. Not sure. Did they be here today? I'm not sure what it's senior night for softball. So I'm saying We've got a number of administrators who are going to join us virtually, but okay. First I thought I was like no can't be in session. Yeah. It's just usually a work group that's on a very sure [Music] Well, you better stop at the pick for all your hard work, Carl. She was five. What do you mean? They're not ready to go on their table yet. I don't know. I think a vase of flowers might go over swimmingly. I'm not that kind of Maybe that's why you don't get breakfast, Carl. Correct. I'd rather prepare my own. That's good to know. I have 5:30. I call this uh May 27th, 2025 special board

003meeting to order. Please uh rise and join me for the pledge of allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands. One nation under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. All right. Thank you very much. One. Roll call. Vote, please. Roll call, please. Dan Wolner, here. Craig Hortman, here. Charity Chandler, here. Tammy Cornier, here. Mike Higgins. Lorie Hoffman here. Diana Johnson. Sam Owen here. Carl Schwaresy here. Thank you very much. Join the meeting. I'll think we'll turn it over to you. Yeah. So, um, in in talking, uh, with our our board president here, Mr. Warren, we wanted to make sure that, uh, we had a special meeting, uh, called together to update some of our newer board members. Um, and there's, uh, at least

004four of you around the table. Um I'm counting Sherry you into the mix of the newer board members who um we um started a facility plan process last year. Uh and that process went uh through a good portion of of that year about a year and a half ago now actually. um went through a year and a half of process, but we really stopped in about uh December, January of this last year um because we needed to focus on our rough funs and so we wanted to continue that process forward. Uh we have members from uh P and Cullen here uh who we have uh contracted with to help us through uh the long long range facilities planning process um and to help us um understand what that means and and go through the study.

005Uh they're here today to update you um in brief a little bit what has transpired. I'm sorry that's a good and then talk about where we're going. um in the future and to elicit some feedback from you as a board as to what path uh we've been going on uh and where we uh need to go in the future um and what you're thinking about when we think about some of the facilities and facilities planning. So that I'll turn it over to our team that we are in good hands with and we've hired to help us go through that process and um I'll be here as a resource uh to help guide you and them through this process. So with that I don't know which one of you wants to start. Okay. All right. Uh

006good evening. Thank you all uh for taking a little time to listen to to us architects um share some of the work that we've been engaged in um yeah over the last year and a half. It's actually I'm live. Uh quick introductions uh who we are. We know some of you at the table and some of you are seeing us for probably the first time. Uh my name is Nick Kent. I'm an architect and educational facility planner uh with P. uh and along with my two colleagues that are here tonight. We have the privilege of leading our educational planning studio. So, this is all we do. Um we only work in the K12 world. Uh we love it. We do this by choice. Um and we get to see school districts um all over primarily

007our states. Um big, small, growing, shrinking. Most of them have lots of maintenance. almost all of them have big books just like you guys have with things that need to be planned for in the future. Uh so that's my brief intro. Um and we'll all share some info with you, Miss Ghost. Hi everyone. My name is Melissa Thompson and it's an honor to be with you this evening. Um I am our director of education strategy and my background is not as an architect. Um, I am a former 25-y year veteran of being a teacher, principal, and superintendent. Um, so most recently, prior to the last two years I've been with PR, I was a superintendent in an area district. Um, so it's great to be with you all. It's wonderful. I've had the chance to

008work very directly with a lot of your staff um, as we've looked at the educational side of building adequacy. So, you're going to we're going to jump into all of that again here in a moment. Um, but it's been wonderful and your staff is great. Um, so we look forward to continuing the conversation this evening. Hey everybody, my name is Deon Cack. I'm a partner architect. Um, my lens of things more along the design side of um, architecture. Um, so how does spaces go together? That kind of thing. Um, I just celebrated 20 years at so. So that's a big milestone. That's very exciting. Um, and I'm excited to hear uh, your thoughts tonight and see where we go from here. So thanks a lot for having us. the other member of our team, Doug

009Kundy. Um he led our uh our staff um as we did our facility assessment of your buildings. Um and I'll get into a little of that detail as we go throughout the presentation. So, thanks again for having me. My name is Sean Cullen. I'm with JP Cullen. We're a construction manager, general contractor based out of Mainville, Wisconsin. Um I'm fifth generation, so as you can imagine being that long, we've got a lot of gener generational relationships with K12 schools. It's an industry we've been in for over a hundred years. So, it's helped me understand and very much enjoy being a part of. Thanks. Uh, my name is Brian Hes. I'm general superintendent for Cullen. Been with Cull for 25 years and in trades for 35. And I'm also a local resident. Excellent. Thank you very

010much. Great. Um, this evening what we're going to do with you is we're going to start off and we're going to do a highle overview of the entire process. As mentioned, it was it's been about a year and a half in the making. Then we're going to do a deeper dive into the four steps that we've been working on so far. And um then ultimately the timeline to move forward and hear among the most important things we're doing here tonight is not just to provide you with updates and information, but to also hear from you as a school board, what your questions are and any directions from the board as we all collectively plan our next steps. So when we look at that agenda item time timeline moving forward, I'll say it again when we

011get to that point, but it's really letting you know kind of broad brush what that could look like, but also very much wanting to shape that and work on it together. And we really do want this to be more of a work session, not a sitand get session. So when you have questions and if you have questions, please ask them. Um and also uh if you have ideas or thoughts um please share them so that we can really look at this as uh our work group um going into that new session of what what's next with our facilities. So we'll go ahead and jump in with our process to date. So in front of you you have a couple of things. some of you who might have just been receiving it's it's good exercise material

012if you're not one of us it did we were talking earlier about yard work this weekend right so uh if you have not received these yet I think you are in the process of receiving a few formalities of the report for steps one and step two so we're going to talk about that so these are some resources that if you don't have yet um will be great for you to look at in the future they're also available online And then the other piece that we're actually going to spend a few minutes on together now is this handout which is also known as a I think in your online version and I think you also have a copy of it in front of you. So just to kind of this this document we're looking at what

013you have electronic access to is what I just held up the bigger book is step one here volume one. You then also have links to the schoolboard meetings where that material was presented as well as volume two which is the skinnier of the two and that is linked here as well and then also the school board um ESC meeting subcommittee meeting where that was presented. There was then actually just over a year ago a joint presentation we did with the school board that is hyperl here. And then as you look ahead you'll see that under step three which is known as shape. We're going to talk about all of these a little bit more in a few minutes. You have additional resources here such that we got from the board a year ago in the

014form of some direction from a workshop. the result of that work we did together last summer in an August 26th full board presentation and then um some more pieces of the puzzle down here that we'll talk about as we go. So with that I'd like to pass the baton to um yeah so we're going to go through um the the first two steps and then as you see we'll go into more detail on on step three on concept development. So first thing um with the first two steps th those happened um in parallel with each other that gives us the baseline understanding for the school district. That's kind of like the state of the schools if if you will I like to call it that. Um so as I mentioned um the other team member

015Doug he led a team of architects um engineers um including mechanical, electrical and plumbing. So you hear me say MEP um and also civil engineering. So go through um all of the school buildings as well as the district office here and let's understand um where they're at. The team put out the RFP. It said we want to see what is our maintenance needs for from from now right a year ago till 20 years. So a pretty pretty long um arc, but it's going to give them a plan um to be able to properly identify and spend um on school buildings to make sure that they're they're properly maintained. when we go through those school buildings, it's a non-destructive review, right? So, we're not opening up any walls. We're not looking above any ceilings unless there's

016a known issue that's there. Um, so this is a review that we do and with our engineers, we use um industry standards. You can find it um in that big booklet um that's saying like what's the service like um for these different elements because we need to project out upwards of 20 years for all the elements in the building, right? its roofs, it's um mechanical, electrical, plumbing, and then architecturally, right? So, it's the things that we can see um within each of the spaces as we went into nearly all of them. Um that then gets put into a prioritized maintenance list and really that's a living document, right? So, as as things from a maintenance standpoint will be picked off or corrected, another thing, right, as we go in another year into the future, that

017will then um be added on to that. That's really how you need to start looking at that. Something to know that um with that maintenance list, so it's prioritized in different levels. Um and again, we went into a lot of detail on this um in our in our meetings a year ago. Um it's not for improvements. It's just for like forlike things. So while we go in, we need to assess them and what we see. It's not is this the right thing to have here still. It's is it here? what is maintenance like on it? Does it need to be replaced now? Can it wait five years? Can it can it wait 10 years? So, it's just like for like, okay, no improvements um beyond that. So, again, we presented that and um just over

018a year ago at the fiscal management um committee presentation and then also about a week later at school board and then we actually did a little recap um back in August. So, again, this big document um it's it's got a lot of knowledge in there. It's got maintenance lists per school building. So if you wanted to drill down into more detail, um here's a graphic kind of giving you an illustration of, you know, where are some site things that we need to worry about. This is uh this is that link. Um and then if you wanted to look at some more detail architecturally, okay, well, where where are those elements? Where are the things in the maintenance? So there's little diagrams to help Kevin and his team identify um where those improvements might need to

019be. So again, that's that's the whole district um all the schools as well as the building that we're in right now. Um and really big outcome is the prioritize maintenance list and up to 20 years. So briefly before we jump adoptions, uh the second piece of this study that Devon noted earlier actually actually happened in parallel uh with the first step of this process was looking at the building qualitatively. Right? So Devon just talked about looking at all maintenance the nuts and bolts is if nothing changes. We have the buildings in place what do we need to be planning in order to maintain them. The second step looks at are these buildings meeting the needs of the district functionally the reason they exist in the first place. Right? These are tools that are used by

020the educators, by students, by the community every day. So we know a lot of things have have changed uh in the world of education. Many things have not changed uh in the world of education since these facilities were built. So step two looks at um what just everything from the very simple like how many kids like what is the capacity of these buildings and where are we trending with how many kids they are actually serving where is enrollment uh landing uh today in these buildings to um do we have enough of the right spaces do we have uh rooms that are too large too small do we have programs that are not properly accommodated in rooms because when the buildings were built those programs didn't exist so that's trying to capture through many conversations with

021district level leadership as well as building level leadership. What is working, what is not working and a little bit of what is the vision of things that we need to be doing differently or better um in our buildings that captures the qualitative state of our facilities. So we take the results of steps one and two which you've heard about and you're about to hear even more about y and then we jumped in um with the school board a year just under a year ago and uh worked to decide what step three which we call shape which is concept development what the board's um parameters and the process that the school board would like us to use to engage the broader community but we're going to go in more detail with that in a minute. The

022reason I'm calling your attention to it, you may also notice there's a blue arrow that kind of goes between that and step four, which is survey. It's what we consider community feedback. So, there are different levels of community engagement and feedback. Some of it can be a formal survey where people might receive something in the mail. They might get an actual survey or they might be prompted to take an online survey. There's that, but there's also actual community engagement where we get together and we meet with people. And so we did do that in December. Um, and that was done with our the staff had an open invite and so did your community members. So we're going to get to that in a little bit here, but I just wanted to kind of as we're

023thinking in totality about what is the process and where have we been. We've actually already started getting through steps three and four. The arrow is because you kind of go back and forth. It's not even necessarily a back and forth. It's more like a cycle. You start to develop some concepts. you get some feedback, you may review, you know, redo a little bit with your concept work and you keep kind of in this little spinning wheel between three and four before you feel like, okay, yeah, now we're ready to really get feedback before we feel like we have our long range facilities plan. So ultimately, the goal by the end of step four is to get feedback and to start cementing what is truly going to be the district's long range facilities plan. Step five

024is something we are not there yet in Watertown and that is where you get support for the plan. Sometimes people feel like that has to be a referendum. That is commonly a referendum. That is not exclusively a referendum. So there can be a lot of different ways that support for a long range plan gets funded and we're going to probably not get into too much of that tonight, but we will be available to talk about that more as time goes. Right. Right. Now we can talk about options development. So this is the step where we were really last uh truly engaged. Melissa noted that step four did get we did solicit some feedback that has informed um a lot of our work. But as we launched into that step, we had a work session um

025with the board at that time. And those of you who are here, you might remember this handout. This is handout B, I believe, in your your packet. And what we had asked the board uh at that time is how do you want us to proceed with developing options and how do you want us to engage the community? So on this handout um there were some options that we that we talked through. Uh the first one was the scope of options development. Are there any uh limitations or directives that you want to put on this work uh before we launch into it? So, we talked about an option is maintenance only. We know we have all all of our buildings. We have the big book. Um, that could be the direction of the district. Just take

026care of what we have. Or we could look at taking care of maintenance plus making improvements to the building. Devon articulated earlier that the maintenance list does not make improvements to the building, just holds status quo. The direction that we received to move forward on was we want to look at maintenance and improving our spaces across the district. We then talked about the process. How do we want to develop these options and how do we want to solicit input? The process we gave three different options. One was a district-led option where really we were getting our direction from internal from the leadership at the district level. On the opposite end of the spectrum was a communityled process where really it was a group of we talked about a group of community members that would meet

027regularly and provide direct input to our planning process. And in between was a hybrid process and that was going to be um direction largely driven by the district but then we would check back out with the community to make sure that we were in line with where uh the sentiment of the community was and that is where we actually landed with direction this hybrid process. We also talked about level of community engagement. How much were we going to be out engaging the community? Low, medium, and high. The direction there was we wanted a medium intermittent level of input from the community. So we weren't out every every two weeks, every month. We were going at key checkpoints um out into the community. And then what is the overall tentative event? What are we talking about

028when we're creating this plan? Uh and the direction there was after April of 2025 or thereafter. So that was the earliest that we would consider uh wrapping up this this planning process. some of the board parameters and non-negotiables that were given to us are identified here on the bottom. Um and you can all um read those um your yourselves or probably have read them. Um but really importance um in this was consolidating the footprint of the district. We were given direction that we were not going to look at maintaining all of the buildings. We wanted options to look at shrinking the footprint, whatever that might um have meant. So this was really our launching point um into our options development work. Out of that work we really got direction. We we really keyed in on

029two sites primary sites in the district. One being the middle school, one being the high school. Those are very large tracks of land which offered us many different opportunities to consider what we might do uh with those facilities um in the long range. So those became two of our key uh key elements or key real estate holdings as we started this planning process. So the first thing we wanted to do was whether it was a board level or community, we wanted to make sure that we all had a that baseline understanding. So again, not going into the specific detail, but if you can think of a a stoplight as a right, red is bad and green is good. Um this is how generally how the the middle schools or Riverside, right? we get all the

030site details and everything how the building fared and then dollars obviously play an important part in that that's where our friends at JP calling who understand the market come in and um they helped us with that maintenance list and John will share the slide in front of you so as you can see on the slide in front of you um the basic message that we want to get across here is every day that you guys wait every year that is waited there's obviously going to be increase to those costs the needs that P just went through aren't going to go way just an increase in cost generally is going to be what happens. So with these numbers what we used was the ENR engineering news record. It's a national publication. Then within that they have

031the BCI building cost index and then that will give you a projection for each year. We take that information with some other information and kind of use our own stuff. Um but generally in projections we are tracking the DCI and it's been extremely accurate these past few years outside of some COVID issues that are out there. But that's essentially what you can see kind of looking out projecting out each year and it's roughly around 3.4 3.5% year-over-year increase. Sorry, go ahead. Yeah, questions. I was just gonna say um while we're here um can you spend some time to talk about the difference between what a level one, a level two, and a level three are? Yeah. Um because we've had some some comments, you know, uh people in the community uh you know for instance

032um we're we're looking at LEAP right now and we're thinking about some things and you know people are saying well a level level three you know are we really in the need to replace that goalpost for XYZ dollars like is that really part of our plan? it and you know I just shared we we did a study that did like for like right and so there's a goal post there does the goalpost need fixing what kind of fixing does it need uh and uh we talked about that so would you please talk about like yeah absolutely what those numbers mean so our board can understand how to interact with those numbers absolutely right and I and what I mentioned before and they reiterated and and Mr. Burch just said, right, life for life. So if

033if it was collectively decided that at least we didn't want to go boat again, right? You don't have to. No one's cared. No one's no one's locked into anything that's that's in here, right? That's that's the known maintenance. That's everything that we're seeing when we're out there on site, what our civil engineers are seeing. Um so the different categories of need, right? So um level one, two, and three. So again, we asked to project out 20 years. You can see the 0 to 5, 6 to 10, and 11 to 20. So specifically to the point of level three, well no, I wouldn't really want to pay for anything of a level three right now because you would be wasting some useful life that that material might have, right? Why would you replace a roof in

034level three when you still have upwards of 10 years or maybe a little bit more. Um what this does is it allows for projection um so that we're understanding what dollars are coming down the road and when that maintenance in these windows of time might be needed. Level one is more of an immediate need, right? We need to start developing a plan and when what year we're going to implement it um in in level two, right, um it's it's um in our in our booklet. It's um fair to pour. it's adequate today, but it's going to require some attention um as we move throughout the years, right? Five years goes by pretty quick um now. And if you don't have that plan and then um everything in level three that's been addressed as a as

035a bear um so if you think about that red red light green light um that would be a yellow. So anything that you're seeing green like that's that's doing really good. Um, I hope that can kind of help um for you to understand that again it's these are just elements that we're seeing out there. There are no improvements. Again, it's just it's just the like for like and then all the different categories and stuff that we go through. So, we're looking at accessibility, right? So, ADA um we're looking at the site, the exterior of the building, the interior, um as well as the the systems. Um, a lot of things within accessibility as well as exterior unless it's a roof that's beyond um, the five-year mark or something. Um, those are all typically going to

036be in level one because we want to keep um, water and elements out of the building and we want to keep heat in the building, right? We're paying for that. Let's make sure it stays in. And if stuff starts coming in from outside, well, that's going to end up sending kids home or make a space not physically able to be used for for teaching and learning. As well as the the accessibility things because that's something that while you're grandfathered in, right now, if someone would have a need that came into your school, it would be something that you'd have to address with a plan. And if any improvements are required to be done, then a certain portion of your your budget um for those plans uh would have to be put toward addressing any accessibility

037needs. And that's, you know, ADA, okay, maybe the first thing we all think about, well, is that is that someone that's uh in a wheelchair? Well, no, that could be any of us leaving this room and we stepped in the wrong spot and we might have broke our leg or broke our arm or it's a visual impairment. It's something that can impact um people for their whole life. for a short portion or perhaps for an extended duration based on health and different conditions. So something that we want to make sure that we're we're prepared and um we know what to plan for. So at the middle school um as this was identified as okay well maybe we have a two question. So I I I think that some of the questions that I've received um

038over the you know the last few months especially when the community members start to dive into this information is um they're a little bit confused. A lot of times they look at this number and they and they focus primarily on okay it's going to cost over the next 20 years $21 million to maintain this building. But they Okay. Well, wouldn't we save more money by by replacing that building? And uh my understanding of of what we're projecting here is maintenance is a one-off type of situation. Uh it's not Yes, there's probably economies of scale. There's probably savings to be made when you replace a building. That's not what we're talking about as a community. We're replacing uh an HVAC system here as needed, a you know, a pool boiler there or a parking lot. And

039those particular costs are um if I'm understanding what you're saying about the BCI, those are reasonably expected costs that we can try to forecast for and plan for in our budget. And without being able to do that, we're going to be in a world of hurt as far as planning for those maintenance costs along with along with some of the other costs. We have accessibility needs and safety and security and systems that are technology that needs to be updated on a regular basis to keep up with current uh current needs. Is is that a good summary of what we're talking about here or did I miss something? I would I feel like that's a good summary of what we're discussing here. Yeah. Um I guess just the clarity on some of the stuff you were

040saying included in this number is like the safety and accessibility, right? Yeah. Okay. I just want to make sure. Yeah. The buckets that are on the slide prior. Yep. is what is in this these numbers here. So, it's not improvements beyond accessibility in some cases maybe. I think that's the one that's probably hardest because people think if you don't have a building that's accessible and you address it, it feels like an improvement, not a maintenance need. Right? That makes sense. But that's the only one that kind of is in this bucket that isn't an improvement. That's not too confusing. Right. May just add a little bit to this. Um because this is a pretty common question, right, from any community, right, or any community member like so you might look at that and say, "Wait

041a minute, are you telling me that if I don't spend $7.4 million on Riverside in five years, my building's going to stop working?" The answer is probably no. You know, as we mentioned earlier, as Deon mentioned earlier, uh the analysis is done using industry standards, ASM, um and other testing agency standards. Does that mean that a system if it exceeds its projected lifespan, does it mean it's going to stop working the day after you hit that that number? Probably not. Uh but to your point, the further you push out beyond what the expected life of a system or a material is, the greater the risk to the district um is. And what we've seen in other districts, and this could very well be something that is starting to happen here, is you start becoming much

042more reactionary to things that happen in your buildings than being proactive and planning for them. So you may have great plans to invest in something that will maybe it's technology, right? you're going to improve something that will help students directly, but you know, darn it, our boiler went out and we've got to have heat and that takes precedence. So, now we're going to reroute our funds to take care of that boiler. So, the intent of this plan is to really give the district a roadmap to proactively plan for these things and budget for them. How however that happens, right? It's just the life of just like our homes, just like our cars. We have to plan for those things and invest money in them. doesn't mean it's absolutely going to fail at that time period,

043but that's what we should be starting to expect. Thank you. That absolutely. Can I ask a question before we get Absolutely. Go ahead. And if I'm getting ahead of myself, please let me know. So, on this this handle, Yeah. it said that the long-term goal were to see if we can get into a one campus model. Is that the long-term goal, guys? I'm just wondering. I wasn't on the board previously, so I'm wondering if that is what the board decided. Two options that we're discussing. Yeah. One of the Go ahead. One of the um one of the things that we were discussing as a board at the time was um uh to to take a look at and explore what it would look like um to consolidate the footprint of the district for efficiency gains.

044you know, okay, if you don't have maintenance people driving all over, you know, the district to service buildings or um plow snow or whatever the case may be. Uh uh even even staff when it comes to the substitute staff, that sort of thing. Those were some of the thoughts that we had as a district uh moving forward when we considered this. Uh now we also we also whenever we had that discussion we always wanted to keep and always have kept the uh public in our mind as far as we need to get a temperature from from the community on what their appetite is for moving forward with with any type of a consolidation of that nature. Right. So that was going to be my next question because you guys said that you met with the

045community in December and the feedback you received from the staff in the community about the one building option. Well, I'm almost wondering since you offered up if you're getting ahead because we're actually about to go through the options that were discuss and then if that's okay with you. Yes, I'm totally fine with that. Thank you very much. I got a question in reference to who came up on the middle school with all this assist or the site and all that stuff. Yeah, we do this one. Yes. Oh, the other side. All right. I got a few questions on that. I happen to own four buildings in the immediate area there. Site fair to poor. Why is that? Yeah. Let me let me let me grab my notes here. Did you get did you just get

046the uh master facilities plan to date, Carl? No. No, I had looked through this. Okay. So, let's see. The um site issues. So, this this might be something that you wouldn't even select right off the bat. The track surface is in poor condition due to standing water cracking, pitting throughout, right? So, that's something to think about, right? We priced what was what's there um and its use. Is it is it even the right thing um to be on that site? Um wide traverse and longitudinal cracks with distressed pavement at joints, areas of standing water along the pavement, concrete, curved gutter. Um there's abrasions falling, cracking throughout. Um and things are past their useful life expectancy. So those are those are just three of the top things that are um our civil engineer pointed out to

047us that we shared with at the other two meetings. So that's why the site I'm sure your civil engineer understands why it is the way it is, right? Yeah. Well, I can remember when I seen water shoot out of that hill, the cemetery where the cemetery is. Sure. I can remember seeing water go up 8 10 feet high when we when that front went over that time and they were they had motorboats going up and down Paul Street. Yeah. So you're aware of that. Okay. Accessibility fair to poor. So, so that's all based on um really when the building was built originally and then what updates have been done since then. So, um the Americans with Disability Act um 1990 it's been reenacted um a number of times since then, but the building age, the

048original was in 1966, so it didn't exist. Um people still had needs at that time, but it didn't exist. 1975 when we had a sizable addition, um still didn't exist. So the building was actually constructed prior to those codes existing. So now we would need to address any of those things to make sure that we have facilities that can accommodate everybody that's within that building. So this can mean um bathrooms. Um there's no there's also no accessible route to the pool. Um there's this is the it can be as small as um additional handicap parking stalls. Um but largely bathrooms um push pull clearances on doors or having door knobs versus levers um is something that also falls into that category. Now that school was built in 1966 when it was supposed to be under

049a new concept. There was no windows, right? View or is that what it was? I I only get this from I was going to school at that time and that school was Bill Church. Was it an open and and there was they were teaching that down at Whitewater about the new concept of no windows and all that. Does that have any play in it? Uh windows did not come into accessibility. We we know that they're good for um for learning um as well as for teacher retention. People want to see out what's going on outside and be connected to their environment beyond their building. Um but no, daylight does not come into account for accessibility at all. It does come into account when we talk about the quality of the space, right? We know that

050any certainly any space that students are in, but really any space that any person is in should have access to natural light um and to views of the outside world and nature. And there are lots of studies that link both of those items to improve results. So now just having a window of any size is a good start, but if we were building a newer space today, we would certainly have more daylight, more views into those spaces than that current building has. Oh, a lady with the PH PhD. How does that affect education? Well, there have been a lot of studies on so it's there's kind of two different bodies of research around that. One has to do with lighting and there have been a lot of studies about lighting and exposure to natural light

051and the other has to do with what's called biofilia. So in other words, what we see outside when we look out a window. Now sometimes yes that's cars and parking lots and other buildings but there's been a considerable amount of research around the positive benefits not just for students but certainly we want our students to have this as well around being able to see nature. So biophilia would be things that are more nature driven, not necessarily the view of a parking lot, but if it's the lighting that gets you the view of a parking lot and you otherwise wouldn't have lighting, you're still better off if that makes sense. So there are there are many many studies about that that I could certainly forward to to Jared or President Wartman if you guys would be

052interested in Melissa that like nature, right? That could just be a tree outside, right? Or something, right? Just seems something, you know. So that was a bad concept back in 1966. It has not proven staying power in the modern era. We'll say I went to that school, Carl, and I'll tell you, I agree with you. I think it was a terrible idea and it made me hate going to school. Okay, I know. You know what kids love? Kids love uh kids love fluorescent lighting and no windows. They love feeling like they're in a prison. Kids love that. I also went to a middle school with Nolan and I'm here to tell you not I might be in architecture because I had that same what were our childhood experiences right she listen to who we are

053thank you yeah thank you um so so right we we first right we understand the building okay well let's understand the site do we even have area to to do anything with well Okay. So, what you're seeing on the screen right now in orange, that's the existing building. North is um to the left. Um guess what? Did you know that you own property across Hall Street, right? Yes, I know that. Yeah. So, but you're you're right. So, others others might not, right? So, well, guess what? You can't do a lot with it. There are some acres that you could. Um but guess what? There's there's wetlands and obviously a How much is in the flood plane? Don't want to do anything there. Uh there's three and a half acres that are outside of it. So,

054I'm going to say about the same. Um, within it, it looks about the same. Um, overall that site's about 38 acres. So, perhaps seven is across across Hall Street, right? Not much you can do from an educational standpoint um over there from any kind of building or anything. In red, you're seeing parking or paved areas. And then what we termed as available land, there's about 16 acres on the north side of that site that you potentially could look at doing something different with it, right? Would it impact the existing building and its site uses? Yes, it potentially could, but this is um where one of our properties that we have the most amount of land is at. One more question. It's next to a drumland, right? I mean, I don't know the answer to that,

055but I could I could find that out. I would I would consider that a drumland. The way the water was coming out of that hill. Yeah. Okay. So, I can look into that. You don't have to. I I know. Okay. I'll just assume it is. Okay. Um, so then the the next property that we looked at um is the high school. And again, getting context, right? This is our newest building in the district. Um, and some might even call it the new high school. Um, but really, right, we're we're we're rounding just over 30 years. Uh, 92 was the original edition, small edition done in 2009. Um, so, right, we're doing much better here. Exterior, interior, good to fair. So, that's things beyond 20 years. um for the most part um fair items those are

056those are elements that are identified um in that level three uh potential category. There are some others that um go into the other levels. Um and then again accessibility um unfortunately there's there's there's some things that that should be addressed there as well. Um but that's a good breakdown of just what's our understanding of that building and then again a refresher on the clock. Yeah, you'll see. I mean, looking out the next three years, we put the the original cost together last fall. Um, and that was at 38 million for that if you do all of the levels. Um, and you can see the increase there. Again, like Sean said, it's about 3.4% every year uh increase. Um, and these are detailed estimates that we put together when when they're engineers and everybody went through

057the buildings. We got a list of over a thousand probably couple thousand items that we priced out. We took to our estimating department based off of our history of 133 years using our historical data to come up with the most accurate numbers for you. So there's a lot of work that went into this. There's thousand thousands of elements that were discussed. Um a testament to the maintenance team that's here. Um and ones that were before is there's equipment that passed it useful. The only reason it can get there is because of the care and attention to maintenance that done on those things to get it passed. So again, um here we we looked at the high school site, we have the northern section uh kind of blown up on the left first start with the

058section on the right hand side. So high school site um about 110 acres, right? That's great, but a high school takes a lot of space, right? Um, we also have some steep grades. Um, we also have uh a flood zone that's there. Steep grades are are over 14 acres of that, right? So, we're down to 96. Um, we also have some other facilities, right? There's storage maintenance um on the on the site. There's look at all those athletic fields, right? So, that's that's about I think that says about 48 acres right there, right? High schoolers come with lots of activities whether it's for physical education or for the other um athletic events that go along with it. Um again the building is in orange. Um we've got the area of pavement. Um right we have

059our bus rodeo. We've got our bus transitions that happen at the high school sites. We need more area there. We're also bringing a lot of people for larger events um at this building. So we need to be able to accommodate each of them. Again, on the left side, that's um north of Endeavor Drive. Um we saw quite a bit of land there, but actually when you look at it, there's there's right there's a disc golf course. That's great. We can work around that. But there's a hill. You can't really work around um the hill that's there. So, believe it or not, there's a little section of um field that's actually farmed right now. I believe it's about 15 or so acres on the on the far north side. FFA is utilizing that area. um that's

060part of the site that we could utilize without displacing anything. But if we looked at the high school site proper, right? Anything that we would attach potentially onto the high school or if there needed to be an expansion or some combination of the two or middle school was coming over, right? If that encroaches on any of those athletic fields, those need to be replaced. So just it's it was good context to look at. Wow, we have 110 acres. Well, actually, not a lot of it's all that usable. Okay, now we're going to dive into what options we did develop and what we did discuss with the board. So, again, this is responding to the parameters that the board laid out for us. Let's hand out. No, it's okay. So, to start off to provide some

061context, we wanted to bring everybody back to what maintenance was. Now we know the board parameters where we do not want to just just maintain our buildings. We want to maintain and improve. But it's important to remember what just maintenance is. So this is graphically laying out what that would cost if we tried to tackle all of the maintenance projects that were identified in the book. And the total of that was about 106 just over $160 million in 2025 um dollars. And just the notation on graphics, we're going to see this as we walk through. So sometimes when we start talking about options and buildings uh we say well show me show me the floor plan show me rendering show me finished architecture we're not at that stage yet. So what we were talking about

062um in this step was big concepts how we want to organize the district physically for the long term. So the graphics that you'll see as we walk through this on the top is uh con that is the current configuration of the district five elementaryaries the building that we're in here the middle school and the high school the bar below it shows a proposed state how we would organize the district and that's one it's organized exactly the same we're not taking anything offline if we are just doing maintenance before we dive into potential reconfigurations that we were talking about possibly our Cullen partners to talk about a question before we dive in. Yeah. Um when we're looking at this, I'm guessing that this is just based on some of those that you were sharing around maintenance.

063Were there any piggyback um traffic related studies that were done to have any consideration as to what the cost could be to the city or anything else around that? And and are those incorporated at all into any of this or is that independent from No, that is independent. Now you have lots of traffic conversations particularly single campus options. What does it mean to consolidate on on one uh sometimes uh if we are pursuing an option and I think some of these that we're about to walk through would probably get us there if we continue on that path where it's it looks pretty obvious that you know we're going to make it we're going to make a dent uh in the way people and vehicles move around. then we would likely start talking about how we

064partner with the city or the municipality to dig deeper into what that really really is. Simple answer to your question is no at this time not yet. Thank you. Something else on on that slide you can stay on this one. It's just right that's the that's the 20 years. So right I just talked about earlier like right you wouldn't pick off all 20 years at one time right that would be an efficient use of the of fund. So, but that's just a good graphic to show the community here's here's where we're at. In the index, does that include a multiplier assuming inflation or CPI or something like that as it relates to maintenance and equipment costs? Yes. Y um maybe one one quick piggyback on that would be so um you referenced earlier Brian about

065the many many many many lines of items. Are those all priced individually or so, you know, kind of how do you put that together? Maybe that was some are based off of square footages. Some of them are based off of the typical bathrooms, what that takes to create. Um, some of it's based off of when it comes to site work as far as what this work, the paving. Uh, if it's brick veneer work that needs to be done, all that stuff's considered. It's broke down as as much as we can for the information we know right now. So Brian, like I mentioned, I heard someone else say there there might be an economy of scale or something if we do this. So how how the items have been priced, right? It's it's each individual thing

066and perhaps if they were put in buckets there there might be some savings or page, right? District, you don't need us to do a a repave the parking lot. Just do that and there's a savings there. Correct. Correct. If there's a bunch of stuff that we can do at the same time, for sure we're going to see whether whoever the contractor is doing the work. So, the more we can get done at the same time, the better. And I think that's what we were kind of hearing last last year at this time or maybe little later later on is we want to try and make some big improvements and not just fix things and move on a little bit. So, um, what see up here now is with the elementary schools. Um, the ones that

067are slashed out were the 25 estimates that we had put together last fall. And then looking at the new 26 numbers for all the elementary schools, getting 27 numbers, we kept going up 20 and then 28. So again, it just shows all the different schools where they were, how much you're increasing every year. So roughly that three 3.4% based off of all the maintenance costs and needs. Um like P say this is just maintenance. This is just the people going the way they are and and that uh 3.4% 4% uh number seems to be roughly about the correct uh you know cost value time value of money when it comes to construction projects other than the co year. Yes. Okay. All right. Any of the 2025 maintenance suggestions in this like I understand it's struck

068out because the school year is almost over. Well, we just approved the parking lot for Douglas. So, take it off. Yeah, that's part of these are live documents, you know. Oh, yes. Economy of scale. What pieces are we going to take? And that's as you guys decide what you want. We're going to continue to refine that number, get more information. It'll be more accurate as we go. We shared 10ear enrollment projections and looked at perhaps a cost per pupil across these as well. Okay. In fact, the very last my little little the uh the booklet, the second mini booklet, if you look at the very last page. Now, these numbers were done a year ago, so they might be a little bit different, but the last appendix here, um 467, I forgotten. Anyways, it does

069break it out the cost per square foot um as well as the maintenance costs per square foot per student. Thank you. So that that is available and certainly that it would be easy to update those numbers over the course of time as kind of kind of eye opening when when you look at it like oh that's a big building that's a big maintenance number. that you spread it out over all those square feet or all those kids maybe maybe not as much. Yeah. But it's also, you know, it's very illustrative to like show that um the high school costs over a million dollars per year of delayed maintenance. Not you know if you were to look at that right numbers can tell pretty tall. Yeah. Okay. So now we get to options. So again these

070were the options through our conversations with the board leadership uh that we brought out and shared with the community. So really where these there there are two general options that we got to. One was a two campus option, one was a one campus option and we have different approaches to each each of those those scenarios. So what we have on and and Deon and Melissa and anyone else please try to I forget the nuances of these been a little while since we developed them. Um, so option A, this is the first of our two campus uh, solutions. And what we were trying to do with some of these was break them down into different size, different size chunks and different movies that would happen in time. So what you'll see here again on the top

071line is current configuration and the bottom line is three phases of work. So keeping in mind that these plans were intended to be 20 plus year plans. So we're not proposing that any of this happens in one shot. This would happen in um different chunks over time. So in phase one of this uh proposal, we would start by consolidating our elementary schools from five to three uh maintaining Douglas Shures and Webster. We would tackle the maintenance uh at the middle school and the high school. We would move the programming from here district office over to available space uh at the high school building. And a note, if you all haven't had a chance to review the volume two of our study. What that showed is we have pretty significant available space in our high school

072that we can start to think about doing something else with. So that was part of our finding. Uh and part of this then of course would be taking Lincoln LEAP and the ESC buildings offline in phase one of this project. Phase two, again we didn't assign dates or when this might happen. So So you said a number of years. Um so phase one is projected to be how many years? It's whenever we might tackle it. This is so we've not inflated numbers. We've taken only current numbers costs and broken them up into three pieces. So So like over 20 years ago is that what you just said to execute the entire plan. Gotcha. Yes. We don't have any idea of phase one phase two. No. No. We did not try to assign say in 2026

073we were going to do this 2036 we could do this. Okay. We never got that far with the community or anything. So that's more so for the community to let us know or let you know. Yeah. And and when you get that far, I'd like you to do kind of a deep dive into what you did with the community. Oh, sure. Sure. Yes. Yeah. Okay. Phase two of this would come, of course, after phase one. That phase would renovate the current middle school building to be a five section elementary school. So, we're going to transform that structure into an elementary building. We would then move the middle school um over to the high school. So, we would expand and renovate the high school to accommodate all of our middle school and high school students. So,

074it would effectively become a 6 through 12 building. Uh this would then allow us to take um Webster offline in phase two. The final phase of this scheme would build a brand new five section elementary school um on either the middle school or the high school sites. So Devon was mentioning earlier we have 110 acres at the high school. There is some area that we could do that on the high school sites. And this is where we start talking about what our traffic implications. That would then allow us if we built that building that would then allow us to take Shers and Douglas offline after phase three. effectively consolidated down to two campuses for the district. And maybe a quick note on the middle school, high school uh combo. Yeah, as you grab your water.

075No, I'm just kidding. Um, so there are there are a range of ways that that looks in school districts. Sometimes people like to, you know, school districts it's it's really what you envision for programming and services. So sometimes it's just physically on the same site and there is not a co-mingling of the students beyond what you know the bus rodeo and that already maybe brings to your site. In other communities, it is a completely shared space so that places where there are specials areas, they are not duplicated or maybe there are some additions to accommodate the additional number and you know size but for instance like your auditorium you wouldn't be building a second auditorium for your middle school or something like that. So there's a range of what that can look like and that

076I just thought maybe take 30 seconds there because that is a big question we get and sometimes something where people have a lot of feelings about that sometimes both directions of what you should or shouldn't do with sixth through 12th grade on a site. Um so we just want to clarify that's not us prescribing what that looks like. We work with you through that process if that ends up being the right solution for your community to make sure that it's designed and built to what your needs are here. Are there any academic or developmental studies pros and cons that that might be available? There are some. I will tell you socioeconomic status is more the delineator in how some of those structured um and other support systems in place. But some of those studies do

077exist. It's not extremely definitive, I will tell you, in either direction as to whether it's beneficial or not. I think it it comes down to factors that are not so much about the building, but more about the management of the building and working with the culture of the students to manage their adolescence, shall we say, developmentally together. Thank you. in in our work, the uh combination has been everything we've just talked about, whether it was for for academic programming or just for for maintenance staff. Someone mentioned maintenance staff. Um also for for shared resources for teachers. Um in one district that were building a a middle school addition to a high school right now, literally they're both both um both schools were on a block schedule. the special teachers were at one building in the

078morning and they literally went over to the high school for the other half of the day just because of the numbers of kids. Well, now the kids are just coming to their classroom and they're spending more time with the students versus traveling between the different buildings. So, different reasons. Um, so I guess I'm correct the way that I'm reading this with this plan. We're demolishing the current middle school and building a brand new. No, I'm asking because it looks like in phase two, you're using the middle school as the high school or as the all the grade schools. In phase two, it it gets renovated to become a five section elementary school. But then you're building in phase three a brand new five section elementary school. Yes. On the current middle or high school site.

079Correct. Which allows us to close the rest of the elementary school that remain. That's how it becomes a two campus. And I think that I'm glad you're bringing this question up because this is something that can again be defined differently in different communities. So, one of the things that we've talked about a lot over the course of the last year and a half has been a campus doesn't necessarily mean the actual like adjacent to the current high school for instance. So, um, it could be that area to the to the north, right, that we just looked at that was the steep slope and where there's a disc golf course. And so, that would really become a question for the community, you know, you all certainly in the community to figure out what does a campus

080include? Is it the same site? Is it being, you know, you can almost touch the building next door to you or is it spread out? So, this was again back to the idea of does it make sense when we were talking a year ago with the board. Does it make sense to try to get down to having all of the elementary students on a site or to bring more of the students to one part of town um for some of the reasons I think Mr. Wartman was describing. U so this would achieve that. It wouldn't have to be on those sites at all. In fact, in a in a few of these options further down the line, you're going to see that there's another proposal about um perhaps the district securing additional land to put

081a potential elementary school or a different building on. Have you worked together? Have there been any conversations around what the the cost savings implications would be from a staffing perspective and a programmatic perspective to kind of overlay because obviously we see this and it's all costs and understandably so because it's facilities focused. But as you're talking about the the qualitative piece and those spaces and things like that, you know, have we taken a look at what those implications might be from a number of staff perspective? Yeah. So, uh, we're taking a look at that not in regards to the facility study, but certainly in regards to some of the, um, budget cuts we may have to do, um, because of the failed referendum. So, we are certainly taking a look at um if we were

082to um outside of um doing some of these nice additions and moving things, what what space do we have immediately available? And what would that look like uh as we move to different spaces? How would class sizes change? And what would that be um with savings in in FTE of of different levels of people, whether it's administration or teachers or whatever? And so we're well on our way of working towards some of what that might look like. That would come with a a large change in how we do programming. Right. Yeah. Right. So if we get rid of the middle school, so goes the swimming pool, right? Indoor swimming pool. Um I believe so. I mean, it is a it is a standalone building with a shared wall, but you're right. I mean, we we

083could demolish the middle school and have just the pool um portion of that. We doesn't mean we have to get rid of the pool, but you're probably right. We probably look at that as an option. Yeah. Do we have a breakout of what the pool is actually costing us? Yes, we do. And just to be clear, this option is renovating the middle school, not demolishing the middle school. So this one would anticipate the pool. You wanted it the pool could stay. Right. Three ft short. So there we go. Let's go 3 ft short. Right. I see that it's renovating in this option but then it's adding a new so college college campus model where you you are all on one campus but you might have separate buildings independent of one another. So maybe one might

084house a couple you a couple of like let's just say sh and Lincoln go into one of the new buildings and then you might have Webster and whatever in the older renovated building but they each kind of have space or it could be for certain grades certain places but in phase three we're building a brand new middle school is that my understanding building and you build an additional grade alongside the middle school building whether that's on the middle school land or on the high school land or um separately could it currently not? Does there have to be an extension to house all the elementary students in the middle school? Um we we need to get to probably the 9 to 10 section range. Um and if you're building a ninth section, you might as well

085build a 10th section because you know it, you know, what what you're doing into that building, you'll want to have that space availability. Okay. So um but we we currently have you know eight to nine sections of students at different grade levels right and um we we need to make sure that we try to capture um enough for the space we have for what we need right now for our students. Okay, we currently got more space than that available in the district. Uh certainly if you look at our max capacities, I know that's one of the things that you'll probably be going through a little bit later. Um, so we have more space available than that, but but that's the amount of space that our board as well as our administrative team have kind of

086identified for what our future is looking like um compared to um a decline of uh enrollment for a period and then a slight growth as forecasted by Roers Roerston. Awesome. Um and um of course once you get five or six years out on a study like that, you don't know because you're dealing with births that never even happened and marriages that didn't even occur, you know, and uh those kinds of things. So we're we're just using our predictive analysis to do the best study we can and that it's why we use our offers because they have a really good track record in doing that for school districts for many many many years. Okay. Right. And so, um, using their analysis anyway, we're going to have a a large decline period with followed up with a

087a marginal growth period. But it's not going to get us back to even today's standards. Okay. Okay. Thank you. I don't remember if we talked about the future of this building. Have we even heard of that? You should look at as as you see in phase one here, there's a little yellow box that's next to the 912. Yeah. Um that's that's potentially an addition to house the ESC or perhaps some area within the high school that's being displaced by the ESC being put into a proper location. Yeah, there's a sensitivity to safety with that just because of the way secure entries and things work for schools. So sometimes you might see the the little yellow box and we haven't identified exactly what that would be for, but just know that those are all the conversations

088we would have with your district moving forward to make sure that whatever that was, it was best designed for that space. Would the district divest any of the properties that are no longer being used or would the goal be to hang on to the properties regardless of whether or not they're used as educational facilities? Right. Um and the discussion was um in the in the plan the cost was given to bring those sites back to a green site. um if for whatever reason the district could not divest of that site so to speak with that building uh intact cuz you know in theory by time the school district is done with it perhaps maybe an argument can be made that that building has lived out its useful life but um that doesn't necessarily mean that

089there isn't value to some prospective buyer so anyway Yeah, just um if if in any of these scenarios if they were to move forward um what we will with and see our districts do when they are um leaving a site is exactly what was said. Um the budget would include enough money to return the site to a green space right to a to a green lot. The point of that is um usually the district will want to make a commitment to the community that we will not leave dead buildings standing in in in the city. That does typically then still leave the boardation the option to find the highest and best use what that site is whether you convert housing or remove the building, sell the land, whatever that mix could be. That's kind of

090becomes a secondary sub discussion. We want to make sure there's enough usually enough money to not leave buildings. Well, a lot of times boards will have a discussion as to uh what the future of that uh vacant site is going to be and sometimes boards will make a recommended period for sale, right? We're going to we're going to hold on to it for a year, two years, whatever. try to try to have it sailable and if it doesn't sell in two years, utilize those funds that were set aside to reclimate, put it back to your green space and then talk uh about what future needs might be because of that reason. They they want to try to get what they can out of it. If you hold on to it for 10 years, right, and

091you sell it for fourth of the market value in 10 years from now, um you're basically using all that money that you would have uh tried to put into it just to keep it afloat, right? And keep it so it doesn't get worse and worse and worse. Um and it's just not a really good modeling, you know, and it's keeping a dead space open in our community. Absolutely. So those are why you do some things. kind of a little different flavor of a two campus um approach. So two campus solution option B. So this one is only a twophase look at how we reorganized uh phase one takes a little bit larger bite uh right out of the gates. So this one would build a new five section elementary school again on either of those

092sites either the middle school or the high school site. So right out of right out of the gates we would tackle maintenance at the high school and move the ESC. like we just talked about, move this function over to the high school. Doing it in this order would allow us to take Webster, Lincoln, LEAP, and ESC offline in phase one. So, we could shrink four buildings right um right at the start of this process. The second phase of this would then push the middle school, so expand and renovate the high school to bring our middle school students over just like in option A. uh and then go back and renovate the current middle school to be a five section elementary school which again would allow us to take our remaining two elementary schools offline. So

093same end result just starting to flip around the order of the parts and pieces a different approach to getting down to two sec two campus districts. Okay. when doing these, what what did the district consider the current programs we offer? Right? Like because LEAP LEAP is an agriculture school, right? So was it is the if we combine it all together, are we still going to keep the total footprint we would need for them to still have an agricultural program? Is all of that considered in the Okay, I think it's a great great question because yeah, no, the program doesn't have to there's no reason for it to live at a building that isn't utilized anymore. Why not bring that program um to where the wherever the elementary school students are and even potentially if you

094have more kids there, then maybe more kids can be exposed to it. Yeah. I and that all that was considered with the plans to well and that's part of how um back a few slides now we were showing that's why we kind of dove right away into the middle school and high school land and what is or is not easily utilizable. Okay, if that's the right way of putting that. Um because you know we understand that sometimes we see space or we think that the district may have more or less land than what meets the eye, right? And so by showcasing areas where you could maybe or maybe it's less feasible to do certain things, there was a lot of thought around the middle school site and actually the area across the street over by

095where the river and you know some of that like well you can't put a building there but look at how amazing that might be for something else, right? Thinking about LEAP versus some of the other programs um and what that could look like. So uh same with the high school, right? There are places you could add square footage or a whole new building. Um, that would give you opportunities to honor the current programming for LEAP or frankly for STEM or other programs that the district has right now. Okay. Thank you. Just want to note on the dollar amounts here. Um, so I did all the price estimating on these. Um, and uh, so just just knowing that, right, these were $205. Um, they do include um, some dollars. Right, you guys got nervous. These do

096include some dollars for um for taking the buildings offline as as Jared had mentioned. Um but dollar amounts they they change. These are for comparison purposes against um each other. And then also the maintenance overlap would come into account as well. So what I I take that to mean is that these aren't hard and fast numbers. They're they're just a rough idea what correct a district might rough order of magnitude to get us in conversation purposes and like Nick said right this this option or the one before it's it's just a different process for how we get there something that might um potentially be the answer or something is just well what's feasible in this first step right what what's what's the community's appetite what's your appetite what's anybody's appetite um for for how we

097look at these things and and how hard does that plan take to put into. Thank you. Okay, a little bit different another flavor of a two campus solution with another variable added into it. So, this one really frontloads uh this approach. Again, two phases. Uh here we would start off moving the middle school uh and the ESC over to the high school. So, we did the big project uh to combine those buildings there. We renovate the middle school into a five-section elementary school just like we'd seen in the previous ones. Now, here's a different thing, and honestly, we could put inject this into really any of our options. We started to talk about geography, and if we're looking at two campuses, geographically, forget about the parcels themselves, geographically, is the middle school and the high

098school, are those the right two locations um in the community to be? She said, maybe there's another option. Maybe there is a new site that the district doesn't even own yet. uh more towards the southwest part of the district and and the roers MD roers study that Jared had mentioned earlier. That's where they're showing there could be potential growth within the community. So if that's where people may be moving towards, is it worth considering moving some district capacity towards those people? So we added in here purchase land in the southwest area of the district. We don't know what that land is. We do not know what the value of that land is or what fair market value is, but it's another variable to consider. Uh so this would allow us again to take Webster, Lincoln,

099Leap, and the ESC offline in phase one. Phase two would then go back and build that second five section elementary school. Either we build it on um our middle school or high school sites or if there is a new sites that the district and the community want to pursue, you could locate the five the second five section elementary school on that new site. And again, this would allow us to take Shers and Douglas offline, reducing us to two campuses. Okay. Now, on something a little bit different, one campus solution. So, now we're looking only at the high school campus and 110 acres that we have. So, option D, again, two phases. So, we're looking at how you could start to break this up into two pieces. Phase one would go ahead and build that five

100section elementary school on the high school site. We would address maintenance to the middle school and the high school. And that's an important piece. So we said middle school. I just said we're going to move to a one campus solution. We're anticipating that there's if this were to happen, there's some not insignificant gap in time between phase one and phase two. And there are still some of those maintenance projects that would have to be addressed to keep that middle school building up and functioning. So, we do have to still include some maintenance investment in a building that will ultimately take offline. If we were to pursue this one further, we'd want to start to think about what a potential scenario for phase two would be because that will then start to influence how much of

101that 20-year maintenance plan do we need to be investing in to keep that building warm, safe, and dry for the students for that period of time. So, this one does inject a little bit of time estimating um into it. So first phase again will take Webster, Lincoln, Leap and ESC offline. The second phase of this project again familiar parts and pieces expands the high school to include the middle school. So we move move our middle school kiddos over there. We expand uh an elementary school. So this is an interesting piece too. We could potentially phase in the full five section elementary school. So we could start a we could start in phase one with a smaller school and then expand it in the future. So, this one anticipates expanding uh the first elementary school to

102a full five phases or we could add a second elementary school on the high school site to hold all of our 10 sections. As Jared said earlier, we're planning for 10. The first one could be designed to have the first five sections then expandable. So, you'd have one really big elementary school or you could have two five section elementary schools on one site. Y and the ended goal of this is pretty self-explanatory. get all of our kids and staff onto one site. Now to traffic, this is one where we had a lot of conversation like what is that? Okay, we can fit them all on the sites. Fine. What is the reality of that to have all the buses, all of the kids from the entire community converge at one at one site? So if

103we were to pursue this one further, this is an example where we probably would want to dig deeper with with the city with busing companies with how do we actually get our kids inside? What does it really mean? Have there been prior conversations with the city to talk about the appetite for this and what you know any concerns they might have or any advantages they might see? Yeah. So, there there's definitely some concerns uh around traffic um around the middle school and the high school as as they stand, right? Um especially at the high school, there's there's um you know, I guess um my understanding is when the school was built, there was another lane that was supposed to be added that never got added. Um they are talking about high water the city high

104water um escape routes, right? uh that would go um you know out past uh Brat Cork Park some way, shape or form. Um and uh that would be a part of the discussion point. Um having another route that uh goes from the back of our land uh back to Church Street. What would that look like? Um as another access uh to expanding that neighborhood, right? Um but anytime um the city expands, right, and and new housing or new buildings or uh new businesses are brought in, um the city's always talking about access and how do we do traffic control patterns and and those kinds of things. From a school standpoint, we're talking about how would we how would we stagger start times um that are meaningful um as as we're as we're looking at that

105for different families, elementary, middle, and high school uh to accommodate for traffic patterns. Uh we know that um in any given uh day, um we're we're we're locking down in an area for anywhere from 40 to, you know, 20 to 40 minutes. um 20 minutes once the kids are dismissed. After 20 minutes, it's usually ghost time, right? Um but it could be a good long 40 minutes for the parents sitting there for 20 minutes trying to get a good spot, right? To to to uh gum up some of the works, right? And so we're we're looking at how do we uh do those kinds of things. But it would it would take a large study um to consolidate like that. Um other districts have done it. Um, but you really have to make sure that

106there's accessible routes. And I think the safety this I'm just anticipating a conversation around safety concerns with elementary schools and newer high school drivers and things like that in the same spaces. So just just curious as to that or there's and those questions come up and and the reality is you know the same answer I give to people who are saying well would you really would you really put like third and fourth graders with middle schoolers or high schoolers? Well the answer is it's being done already somewhere in our nation and or our state right um and one campus solutions are being done in areas you know with cities our size. The question that we want to pose to everybody in the community is do we want that for our community, right? Uh and that's

107part of a long-range facilities plan is to have some of those conversations. Do we want those kinds of things uh knowingly for our city? What are the positives? What are the negatives? And and what do we really want? Are there available case studies from prior partners as to you know what what some of the feedback have been from a pros and cons perspective? So, as we were talking through the one campus solution, um the most often cited example in our region is school district. Their entire school district is much like what we're proposing here on one campus, one big loop around. Um that is really the only in our region comparatively sized districts that we we know of. Um, it works well. I'm sure there are parents who would say it works terribly during pickup,

108but arguably that's true of every pickup anywhere. Um, is there positioned in in a similar part of town or is there more centrally located? Pull up their district boundary. I live I'm technically live even though I don't we're on the other side. So, our kids go to a different school system, but um they I would have to pull up their district boundaries to answer that question. Um because with Pewwaukee Lake, they kind of snake to both sides of it. So, I don't I don't know the answer to that without looking. I would say they're fairly dead centered based upon just the geography 16 comes and WCTC borders them on one side, a church borders them on another side. Um they well I would also want to check the acreage that they have um and how

109that compares to your high school site off the top of my head. I wouldn't want to miss on that. No, absolutely. How long has Pwock been a one campus solution? Oh, long time. A long time. Yeah. Yeah. It's not new, right? What's the size comparison? and students [Music] I think it's a little bit bigger if I recall but we again need to double check those numbers for you um and and you're talking about a one campus solution but not necessarily a one building solution so in water temp you can get anywhere in 10 minutes right so if you've got say you've got a specialist that needs to go to all the schools what's the difference what's the advantage if he or she is driving across town or across the parking. Sure. What's the I don't

110understand the advantage of the one campus solution versus what we have now. Yeah. So from our perspective from a building footprint standpoints um there is savings in how much total building square footage that you are owning, maintaining and operating, right? So let's just use your example. So say you have a specialist that maybe visits or serves three of the elementary schools. That specialist may have an office or a workspace in three different elementary schools. There's nothing wrong with that. It's just three of the same room where we now may if we're consolidating now we may have one of those spaces because that person is only in that one area. So everyone have has to have an office in each different spot can't have like a a shared space. No, that's another example. So even in

111general in schools and buildings and hall types today we have a lot more we calling spaces. Correct. So, right, you share you share those spaces, right? So, you wouldn't duplicate all those spaces. Not necessarily, but we're also not talking about building five new elementary schools. The spaces already exist in in these buildings. So, it's absolutely a choice, right? You could continue to maintain um all those buildings. That's totally fine. Well, I'm not asking you to do that. I'm just trying I I I don't like the um the scorched earth approach here. Sure. Um I I think there's a more measured approach somewhere else. True. So far, five, that's fair. We're rounding the bend towards the end because we have five. So, and those are absolute, you know, those are completely of course valid um inputs

112and that's exactly what we what we need to hear, right? So, this was this was an attempt to look at what does it mean, right, to just put everybody on to onto one campus. Is it the right idea? I don't know. That's the conversation that we we need to have. What is what is right to Jerry's point? What is right for this community? So, it has to be right for this community. Well, I would like to know what you guys have heard from the community in December because the things that I hear about a one campus solution. I'm not hearing many constituents saying, "Let's do it." Right. So, I'm just wondering what you guys heard, what reflection you guys receive. Would you like to do option E first? Sure. Yes. totally good with you. Yeah.

113And and and the other thing that I you know I want to remind the board of is recall that um these aren't these aren't just P saying hey do this in your community right um P had a meeting uh with our our board and you can go back and on that one pager you can go back and view and see those but they were given um a chance the board was given a chance to look through a lot of different ideas and options and remember the direction of the board at the time was let's focus um on um consolidating and improving our sites versus maintaining some of our older buildings and having such a spread out footprint. Okay. So that was the direction that was given by the board to put scenarios together at that

114point at that point consider what the cons what the community wanted. Well, again, that was really early on. That was really So, all of this is kind of rough draft ideas. We could I'm not saying that we should we could walk out of this room and we could say, "Hey, even though this was talked about by the board over the last year, we've decided we want to do something completely different. These things are still working." Okay, so none of this is set in stone. This is the reason that we're having this meeting is so because almost half the board is pretty new. I mean, me and Dan have been here for a year. So, if you count a year as being pretty new, we really have a large majority of the board that's that's different

115now. So, we're trying to get that out. I have some questions, too. And something um that I'd like to address, but I want to see you guys get through before I before I ask that question. But before we do, I do want to make mention that even before the board made the decisions or kind of guided some of the um decisions to to try to go for a one to two campus solution. There was a pre there was a meeting there was a couple of meetings a ahead of that where it was a focus group with the community uh on and that also tried to steer some of that discussion as well as I I'm not sure if there was more than if there was a survey um but there was there was a discussion

116with the community at same point yeah part of this is actually um pulled into the conversations that were happening with strategic planning with community at the time. Um, so this was there was a section of that effort that was dedicated to starting to te up this conversation and solicit some initial feedback. Yeah, it was three days actually after meeting on 17. Yeah, I remember you guys coming to the strategic point. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, real quick. Option E. So this is um again a little bit different variation on idea for well one campus. This one breaks it down into three phases. The first phase moves middle school over to the high school. So that's that big project over there. It then renovates the middle school to be a five section elementary school. Again, this is anticipated.

117This is a long this is a long timeline and we need to use the middle school in a modified version as an elementary school for more than a couple of years. Um so this would allow us immediately to take Webster, Lincoln, and the ESC offline. The second phase of this work then goes back to the elementary schools and constructs a new bisection elementary school um on the high school site. We then get to shrink and take Shers and Douglas offline. The last phase of this reconfiguration that the district would expand the elementary school and actually just I just found a typo that was not caught from over a year ago. In phase two, it says expand elementary school from phase one. It's really phase two. So that'll be a 10 big 10 giant um elementary

118school or we build a second elementary school on the high school site to hold our 10 sections of elementary students. Um so that would then allow us to take the middle school which had been converted in phase one to an elementary offline and reduce us to that single campus. So again just like the two section or the two campus models this is just reconfiguring the parks and pieces a little bit over time. And that takes us through the five options. So with that uh again kind of thinking about so that those options were developed if we look back at our very first handout here. So that kind of all happens in about a two-month span of time. So we were here with the board on June 17th. got some additional feedback uh June 20th from

119the strategic planning group. Then um came and had a conversation with the school board showcasing what you all just saw tonight A through E for the very first time with the codeboard on August 26th and then got some feedback from the school board at that point in time and then scheduled some community sessions which happened on December uh 3. We met with the staff first in the afternoon at about 4:00 and then we had a community open session the same night. The third was also at the high school. Then we had the fourth and that was at the middle school and then we had the fifth and that was at Shur Elementary School. And so our total participation for that we had approximately 30 staff members. We had about six community members for the first

120evening, one that was also at the high school. We then had a sum total of three additional people between the next two sessions if I'm remembering correctly. So we had, you know, we we absolutely want to answer your question about the feedback. I totally good. Cool. are we are at you know the the lion share of the feedback is from staff and there is no reason to discount or I'm not saying that's not very exceptional feedback because they live and work in the buildings every day. Um but when you're asking what does the broader community think and feel it was really less than 10 people who were not employed by the school district that were able to join us for those three events. Okay. So I don't know if there's anything else um Dr. B,

121you want to say on that before I bring up? No, I just wanted to share that um that's also why we're thinking restart. Yeah, a lot of people's uh minds and focus were not on that at the time. They were they were starting to hear ideas of referendum. Some people, you know, um came to the referendum meetings um and wondering what were we talking about? Were we talking about facilities? when we talk about um operational referendum, what was it? Um um and there there became some confusion. Um we need both. We need to have a discussion about both. Getting a secure budget that we can work under for operations and also having a facilities plan for our future and what does our future look like in in the school district. Uh, and so what we're

122we're trying to attempt to restart today is having some discussion about what does our what do our facilities look like? Um, and how do we want to um try to put a plan together? And really, it's it's a plan. You know, some of you might say, well, what if we adopt, you know, one of these and it's a three-phase thing and that's over 30 years. You know, what happens if phase two and phase three never happen, right? Uh, you know, what's the contingency plan? How are we going to deal with that? And and the idea is, you know, we understand that things may change in 10 years. 10 years from now, we we may throw out phase two and say, "No, that doesn't meet our needs." Either we had a lot more enrollment or a

123lot bigger decline. Uh but having a a good plan and having to try to steer towards that plan is something that good school districts do. It it helps people understand the maintenance that needs to happen. uh has a good facilities plan over time uh that we can try to invest in and or uh share with our community um so that they're they're they're understanding and they know what we need to do. So I I wanted to clarify something and you have to excuse me. We we went through a lot of different planning uh phases over the last year or so. We went through a strategic plan. We went through uh we went through communications for operational referendum plan and then we went through uh our master facilities plan. So there's a lot of stuff that

124kind of comes together and there's a lot of similarities in those discussions when we when we sat down with focus groups surrounding the uh strategic plan. Some of that discussion came up at that time that that people wanted to see some better efficiencies in our buildings as well. So there's some overlap in the discussions that we have had in the conversation wasn't necessarily P driven but that that was that but also one of the reasons we uh asked P to uh do a U facil facilities master plan master facilities study was because one hasn't been hadn't been done in forever and and um in order for us to have a better understanding of what those particular um maintenance needs are going to be futurewise that we need to plan for um as far as deferred

125maintenance is concerned. That's why we we uh elicited their their assistance in that nature. Um so so uh then I'm going to follow up with my question because I think what it comes down to is what in a lot of cases for people it's what are the bottom line numbers showing? I don't have all of the information. So what I put out here I'm well aware is not every piece of information that's going to get you there. That's why I want to ask this question. So when I'm looking at options A through E, well actually I'm sorry, let me let me ask one clarifying question. The maintenance only option the total for the school district is 106 million. What time frame are you looking at for that number? because your options A through E are

126all over a 20 year timeline or even longer. So is that also true of the maintenance only? It it would just be over the the same period of the level. Okay. Got it. Got I just want to make sure because that lines the numbers up obviously. You know of your zero. Yeah. And so then what I look at is I look at what the total number is, the 106 million, and then I look at how much the maintenance is going to be bottom line at the end of the very long process. Um, it's going to be 61 million for elementary schools and middle schools. All right, that's what I came up roughly on the low end. Um, and then if you look at the total, the low-end totals for all of the other options, you

127end up coming up with uh you end up coming up with a variety of three-digit figures, million million figures. If you subtract that 61 million from them, I think at the end of the day, people are going to say, why would you start closing down schools and changing schools if it's going to cost us way more to do that? Why not just do the thing that costs less money? So my question is even if you subtract the 61 million that you would save in those maintenance costs and in some cases you're still going to have to put about 10 million of those maintenance costs into into the plan. You're still looking at an increased expenditure of you know 100 like 150,000 250,000 there 200,000 somewhere in that range I think 250 on the high end.

128So, I think the information that I'm missing there is how much it costs to continue operating each of these school buildings every year. And I think that that changes the outcome there. But at the end of the day, even the lowest option is still spending about 45 million more than just doing maintenance. Yeah. I'm not saying that just doing maintenance isn't that bad. I'm just trying to look at right numbers wise how that kind of turns out for people. and and the maintenance needs to fully be integrated into those numbers for moving forward too because depending on where an in addition by code that might drop off some maintenance dollars that that type of thing. So those dollars are going to change with that maintenance overlap on those buildings. This was purely just where do

129we if we need to move students and a program then how do we do that? What would that addition cost? What kind of renovation costs might be needed for that? But we did not overlay the maintenance dollars in there. We did include dollars though to take care of buildings that were coming offline again to the to restoring them to a green field site. Um so but yeah, doing doing anything like if you're building anything or you're renovating anything it it costs money. Um and and these options any kind of addition um it's going to cost money. It's about finding or finding what your community, what you believe is the right size footprint moving forward and having that plan moving forward so that we're not looking at okay we have 8 million or 6 million or

1302 million at these buildings when are we getting the the highest most possible use out of them. So yes, cost there is an investment to to move maybe maybe something that might help and I don't know if we have access to this document but remember the A through G or whatever we went uh uh through with um the board uh we talked about um at the board level uh this this conversation came up and you you guys were very new and and so I don't know if you remember all the discussion points but certainly we we brought up the idea that um maintaining the buildings that we're right? Although it may cost a hundred and some million dollars over the course of 20 years, right, is still probably one of the cheaper options. We then

131talked about the need for as much space as we have and would put money into space we don't need. Uh we also had some discussion about if you're going to be putting money into something, what is the the the not only the 20 years of time that we're looking to do the investment, but then after the investment, how long you want that investment to last. So, um looking at going into newer spaces, um and being able to, um um go past just maintenance and look at maintenance plus improvements was something that the board really wanted to look at because they wanted to take a look at not only the 20 years, but also what do we want for the next 20 to 30 years after that and what does a a newer renovated space cost

132to maintain in the future versus uh maintaining a continuing uh a continual aging space. Um, for instance, I don't know uh what the exact year Lincoln was built in, but give me a rough estimate of when that was built. Do you guys know 40s? Right. 1840s. In the 40s. You said I was like 1840. What are you talking about? No, but but like in the 40s, right? Yeah. But we're closer to the 1800s. Wow. No. What? 46. So, um, you know, continuing cost of let's say we keep that up for 20 years. Do you want to keep that up for 20 years plus another 20 after that? Yeah. And that's exactly what I'm asking for. Yeah. Because I think that that is a missing piece of the formula. That helps explain, you know, why even

133though option B costs an additional $191 million, that might not actually be the end cost. But I think unless we can quantify that, it's hard to move forward. Yeah. I think I think um you know, reducing it to uh having a a level of understandability, right? Like, you know, and I'm not saying we're we're dealing with a car in your family, right? But if you're driving around a 15 to 20 year old car, right? It's getting due on some fixes, right? You can fix it and drive it for another 10 years, maybe. um versus uh buying a new one and starting with no fixes, right? Well, less and well or less, right? I mean, because you talk to the wrong people here. No, no, I hate That's true. Believe me, when I when I talk

134about keeping I just had to get rid of my 2005 CRV, right? And I'm just disappointed in it. But I I have now only a 2016, so I'm moving with the times. Go off the space. Anyway, uh al along with that I'm not saying that that's the that's the decision you all will make, but the the previous board decision was we want to get feedback about what our community thinks about doing maintenance and improvements, not just maintenance. And there was a list um do you guys have it of the uh I just sent a link to them. Okay. Um there and I'm sorry that we don't have it for the is there a way to put it up on the screen for uh people in the community. Um, you know, there was a list of

135options that P gave the board to think about anywhere from maintenance only through a number of different stages to consolidating, right? Uh, and you should have that um, and see some of the things that were discussed and talked about. Um, but that's what got us to hear interested. I I feel like I'm way behind Apollo because I, you know, I'm new, but um I I'm interested in in uh the possibility of building a new middle school on the high school campus because of a the windows, but b the the water drainage issues that you discussed. And um rather rather than than kind of like the the everything approach here and looking at that and saying is this something a community thinks is worth it? Yeah. Some some of our members of our community also brought

136up like you know the idea we talked about going to growth areas or or creating growth areas. Uh, for instance, if we were to build in the southwest portion, where would we can where could we secure land and and is the city going that way? Um, but also what was brought up um many many years ago and and more recently was the idea of expanding at the leap site. You know, making that into a a two section school um one that fits more than a half section at a grade level like we have now, but to try to get open enrollments from Okana, Milwaukee, Houston, you know, so on. um we we see that that's a solution that Okconam is trying to do with um Exonia right and having the elementary expansion that they did

137there most recently. So there are we are we are still in that phase that survey phase um and because we have a newer board halting the process and saying okay here's what the last board decided are we still on the same path we going to choose a different path what does that look like and how do we move into what's next and and I think that's about where we need to start turning the phase right you you saw what was offered you you heard the information and the figures and everything else but my question for you, board is what would you want to think about for the facilities plan and how would you direct um our team as well as P and um Pullen to look at to then re-engage our community with ahead Carl.

138I got a question for you. Yeah. Did you ever hear of a course called corporate fiscal management decisions? Yeah, Greg. Sure. Sure. You took it. Probably something similar. Are you aware of it or have you taken one like that? It's right there. All the information that we need is right there and hoping that your estimates are accurate and we know the progression, Mr. H. Yep. Yep. So now we got to sit down and figure it out. Yeah. And thank you for all the information. Makes it makes it much easier. So, I don't want you take offense to my question, but I need to ask the question for um to to clear the record up because there's some miscommunication out there. Is the board or the district obligated in hiring P to move forward in any

139type of construction process? No. No. The same thing with Coen. Answer is no. Okay. And what is why is it that we called upon Cohen to assist with us in this process? I can share from an administrative standpoint because I made the recommendation, right? Um, one, uh, they know their stuff. They've been doing it for hundreds of years. Well, not hundreds, but over a hundred years, right? Um, also they uh know our facilities really very well. They did the 2008 um additions and construction, right? Um they have members uh on their team who live in our community like Mr. Hess here and have a heartbeat on our community versus some other companies that we interviewed that, you know, aren't even from around here, right? Their home bases are from miles and miles away. That's why

140uh they were given the opportunity from the board, right? That was what our board decided. Um and those were the reasons that the board gave for saying yes to it. I can stand my Craig. I mean, being a member of the community for my entire life and I grew up on a farm on the south side, lived in town and now I live on the north side of town. I want to be a part of this. Yeah. No, no, I'm I'm not I'm not actually I'm I'm trying to address some community concerns, I guess. But the real reason that the real reason we brought Colin on, right, is is we need somebody on the the building side uh to really help cost out the things that need to be costed, right? And so, um, P

141can come in and talk about like architectural needs, uh, you know, you know, civil engineering needs and all those other things, but really we need people, um, on the building side to to really tell us what that means in dollars and cents, right? And so, we've got a team here that's working together uh, to help benefit us. Their contracts end when the facilities plan is done. uh we can seek out a different uh con uh architectural firm to draw up any uh plans or phases that we have. Um we can certainly have any other construction company come in and do the work. Uh and so I just want to make sure that people are very aware of that that this is just for the facilities plan that we're working on right now. Bidding process, right?

142Yep. So, so we we've hired them to provide research on our buildings, our facilities, um to try to forecast some of our future needs and to also try to give us an insight on uh what kind of ideas uh we might uh consider moving forward as a district. Um I I appreciate the conversation so far. I think that there's there's um there's some skepticism in the community and some concerns within the community on on what this looks like moving forward because we've had uh we're we're coming off of an operational referendum that failed. Uh so I still maintain that we as a district we still have to try to plan for the future. So knowing what the options are and being able to present that to the community and ask them what they would like

143to do is a good thing especially especially considering you know nobody wants to be driving around an old beater car forever. You know if they can avoid it does that does that attract people to the region to the district or not? I mean those are good questions. So, if we're going to do something with with the existing buildings that we have, we have to spend some money to try to fix them up and keep them in in good uh operational condition that is conducive to uh a strong learning environment. Uh so, just those are my two cents. I'm I'm open to whatever we decide to to move forward with, but um I think moving towards some savings and and efficiencies to a one or two campus solution was kind of my thought process too that

144I shared with other board members at the time. Uh if that has changed, I definitely I'm I'm open to that discussion. Well, I think one thing we'll have to factor in no matter what happens is sense of pride. You know, I was having a conversation with my dad about this meeting and he's like, "As long as they don't close Webster, you went to Webster 40 years ago, you know, 50 years ago, whatever it was." And and so I think that that that's something that weighs into it from an emotional perspective. you know, those folks who have gone to schools in this community and stayed in this community love their school, you know, and so, you know, part of it is how how is there sensitivity to that while also helping bring people along for a

145certain level of understanding as to to what it means going forward? And I know that's not something perhaps that that's covered in in hundreds of pages of facilities planning, but it is something that, you know, we know that our our community will look to us to to help with. Yeah. the gentleman sitting in the rear of the room there. He's the one we got to count on. Yeah. Just to keep the facilities going. Done a great job so far. Yeah. So, um I I I mean I think that it's pretty I think that we should move forward with asking people in the community, making more opportunities for that input to come in and asking people, what do you want to see happen? What kind of changes do you want to see? But I think we

146need to ask that question in cooperation with some pretty clear uh numerical breakdowns as far as what the costs associated are going to be. if there's a way that we can uh fill in some of those blanks that I was asking about with um you know in addition to the saved maintenance costs adding in um what does it look like to not be you know operating you know say LEAP or Webster or any of these given schools for each year looking at what that looks like would be helpful and I'm assuming you you want just the facilities costs not a closing that would eliminate uh any of the staffing or anything like that. You're assuming staff. Yeah, just facilities cost. Let's piece. Yeah. Okay. I I think that would just help create a clearer picture.

147And then I think if people are looking at like say option D, which is the lowest of the five options when you take into account the maintenance costs. Yeah. If people see like okay, so option D would cost 45,000 or 45 million more. I wish it was 45,000. 45 million more, but we're saving five 10 million on operational facilities costs. I'm I'm just throwing a random number out there. I'm not saying it's anywhere close to that in either direction. If they see that, I think that's going to help people be able to properly contextualize what would look good to them. And I think that, you know, Carl, you and I were talking about this earlier today. I think there's and also Laur chiming in. I think that I would not be surprised if there's a

148number of people who within the community don't feel very strongly in a positive sense about the middle school because of its design philosophy. I'm sure there are some people who have fond memories of it, but I think that of all of the schools, that one is probably the uh least hospitable to students from what I remember and from what I hear. Uh so I think that would even you know maybe there's a solution that lies somewhere in that in that vicinity. Do we have any more data on the drainage issues at the middle school? Do we do we know anything about else about that? Well, I can tell you all kinds of issues about it. Um do we have any any anything we can put forward saying yeah this is how much all the all

149the homes around there they all have wet water issues from in the basement. Okay. Which cost you dearly and that that affects the foundation of a of a building like a school. I would assume now it's coming. Yeah. Building foundation. That's 100%. But we built a city on a marsh. So I mean you're going to have that throughout. Well, the north the north side is a little bit better. And a drumland. Yeah. They put a cemetery there. So, do we do we know I can look and see if there's anything um from our civil engineer and what they saw. But again, that's a non-destructive review. They walked around and looked at surfaces. So, unless something's actively going on at that time, um they're not going to have flagged anything. Do I have a maintenance history?

150We do have some water getting in the building. I that's good enough, right? We have I mean we've had to put storm water facilities in locations around the building to manage it, manage that and mitigate it. But we like to joke there's a reason they built a pool where they did but but there there is or there have been issues of water m water infiltration. We've had done uh like you say some exterior storm water projects to get water around the building and there's been some interior remediation that been is that something you'd expect to have to work on in 10 years or or maintain? Oh, sure. We'll have to maintain the longer facilities for sure. We're also going to have to get the city on board with the transportation. I mean, if we went

151ahead with this, you know, not have a another egress. Well, I mean, I think we're I think we're at a stage in the um discussion where, you know, we're we're we're doing a lot of brainstorming and before we decide to go down and do another particular study for traffic flow and get city involved. uh we we have to get a general idea, general appetite from our community on on which direction they want to go, you know, otherwise we really can't. I mean, it you're wasting everybody's time. I mean, we're wasting everybody's time on that sort of thing. We no longer do that. Um I had a question about the uh the buildings. Do we have uh an expected breakdown like uh incrementally within the first five years, first five to 10 years and first, you

152know, 10 to 15 years of of what the expected maintenance cost of a new building might be over, you know, per, you know, per per square foot roughly. And so that we have an an understanding of applesto apples comparisons because if we are investing in a new uh facility we we can certainly expect that there's going to be maintenance costs associated with that. That's a fair a fair question that people have to to to give you a an idea of one of the things that you asked for Sam and I only have the elementary here in front of me but if we if we look at the last three years of cost the 22 school year 22 23 23 24 and 24 25 average cost of operating these buildings without staffing uh for Webster is

153about 186 187,000 Uh Douglas was 155ish,000. SH is 126,000. Um 87,000 for Lincoln and 32,000ish for LEAP. If you want to know what those are, um you know, broken down by per pupil. Um it's actually $500ish per pupil for Webster. Douglas is $495 per pupil. Uh Sh 541 per pupil. Lincoln 593 per pupil. and leap 616 per pupil. So that's about for all five of the elementary schools that's 500,000 per year something like that. 400 to 500,000 per year. And that's considering maintenance, right? I was just What's that? It was the first one you said like 180. Yeah. 187 uh then 155. So that's, you know, put put this, but then some of them are much smaller. So that's why I was kind of hitting like I'm just I'm just really roughly ballparking a figure

154there. And then but that those are those are utilities and maintenance and maintenance as well. 588,000 if I summed them all. Grounds maintenance, pest control, management, utilities. Yeah. I mean that's our operating cost without staffing. It's not necessarily um the extra maintenance or other things that is that going those were the those were the costs that were incurred and attributed to those buildings. We may have district level maintenance costs that we did we did out of a district level dollar, not necessarily a building level dollar, but that's just elementary only. Yeah, those are just the elementary ones. I don't have the middle or high school on the spreadsheet. And that's also considering a potentially deficient budget when it comes to uh deferred maintenance. Yeah, that's that's operating out of the budget we have available to

155us right now. And so and but but that's useful information. Is that what we would have spent? I don't know. Right. Yeah. I've already got like kind of a rough estimate of what maintenance costs from some of those other numbers that were provided. So then if you multiply that out over a 20ear span, that's almost $12 million. So that's kind of what I'm looking for is just these rough numbers. If you're looking at like if next year we enacted this and we did a huge shift and we closed down the we close down every that's what you would save correct across the course of 20 years. Yeah. So being equal to those numbers. Yeah. And just as as a rough estimate that so that throws it. Are utilities a large portion of that? Uh that

156would be a Kevin question. uh he he does he deals more with the utilities cost and and everything within the maintenance and I certainly don't have Sarah here so I would look to both of them to tell you the details of the I don't have to know but imagine I would say that's quite energy efficiency projects to help improve that that's part of the improvements we're talking about when we get to some of these options right because we're talking about community input I spend on the Zoom. I believe you may have been as well just from the echo at the beginning. Are we going to take some of these questions back to a future meeting and see if those are things we can answer and share and are we looking to do because I know

157obviously some of the conversations we've had internally is that starting next month it would be up to the committee chair to allow public comment. You know, is that um you know, are we looking to do that in the larger forums like we did for the strategic planning meetings? I know Tim, you were there this summer and and a lot of board members were at multiple meetings um to participate in that. Are we envisioning something like that with multiple multiple opportunities for folks come together? And if so, you know, are we looking at neutral site locations? Are we looking to do it at one of the schools that may have the capacity to bring in larger number of folks? That's a great question. And I think that's um it's been something that's been resonating around the

158the board as well as well as in the community that some people want to participate in a like a like an open forum type of thing or sort of open yeah town hall where we've had more of those um discussions maybe maybe in this particular case we we we hit it a little bit on the What are the what words that you use? High and continuous type of uh uh process uh well level of community engagement um perhaps and um so um what I'm hearing uh as we move forward right today was a good get everybody up to speed. what you'd like to see is one more meeting with you guys to discuss the information you heard and um if there's more information you would like for us to detail out for you like Sam's

159question about how much money does it cost to operate a building without um you know staff cost in it. Uh we can get you all that information, but it sounds like you want another meeting scheduled to reflect on and talk about where we're going. We then also set up a um a schedule for moving forward because we do have a rough schedule moving forward um that we can share with you. Um I I just want I don't I want to judge where you are. I don't want to get too overwhelmed and get too far ahead without having answers or whatever else. So, um, if you would, we can turn it back over to P a little bit and Colin just kind of talk about where, you know, where we're thinking about going, what we we've

160talked about to try to get back on track. Okay. And then we'll get your feedback as to what you want to do. Yep. Yeah. So, with that, um, we you have at your place at the table, I believe, something that looks like this. It is a timeline. it would be the third of the handouts um available to you. So this kind of to Jared's point, this is just something that we had been using and then we took and rolled forward. It did not mean that that is where we have to go at all. Um but it may be useful. So we wanted to leave um knowing that many of you were not around for the complete journey. We wanted to leave the first part just as a historical so you can remind like where were

161we, what were some of the things we did. Um, but if you open up you'll see on the back of the first page that we have kind of this February through May, we called it a pause for operational referendum process. Then we're jumping back in together here just down at the bottom. So, as I said, this is not a prescription. It is just a rough draft of some things. So, uh thinking that in June and July through perhaps what uh Dr. Burke was just suggesting a chance for the board to take in soak in, we can follow up with any of the questions we've been taking them down. Um the P or Cullen can answer. Certainly, you have a couple things the district would need to give you more information about. We could get that

162back to you, do some more interaction with the board, gear up. We were targeting uh doing some community engagement sessions potentially in the month of August. Um we know that summer is tricky, but usually as we get towards thinking about the start of the school year again, people are at least reading school emails and functions or not. If you think it's better to wait, we could do that, too. But just proposing that we kind of use the next month to six weeks to gear up, get the communications going to engage people to come in and and have those conversations. Also then again, if the board wants to continue down a path, I think I heard Mr. Lortman talking about maybe getting some formal feedback. Then sometime perhaps that is in August, we're recommending considering uh

163formal agreements with a survey company or somebody who can help make sure that every household in your district gets whatever the upshot of some of this next engagement could look like. Maybe it's more kind of we always say going down a funnel, right? We're kind of still up here at the top of a funnel with a lot of options, a lot of conversation about things. you start to go down your funnel and then maybe you want more widespread community engagement. You really want to make sure you're hearing from a cross-section of your whole community the best you can. So we would just recommend again whether that's August or sometime in the future if the timeline uh goes out further but looking into some form of survey opportunity then we're thinking in September we would be

164taking the feedback we would get from August and then turning that around so that that could actually get put onto a survey. So that's kind of a couple steps that happen there. Uh, as you can see here, then we've scheduled out. I'm not sure if this will still be your still committee structure. I know you're um just starting off the new board season, if you will, but there had been a referendum planning committee that fed into some of it, the fiscal management and then the board of education. So, we left those. That can also be altered. But then we're in September starting to turn around and get a survey ready. You would have the opportunity to review that through your committee structure, make a final approval so that the community is actually getting the survey

165in the month of November. We would try to promote that especially those first two and a half weeks pretty hard. Um we know what starts to happen once hunting and the holidays um set in. So, but that is a good time for engagement. Some of the things that are so busy in the fall season start to die down a little bit. Take a breather. Then in December, you would receive and hear the survey data. Um, and then we would ground the bend into the new year and start thinking about, okay, now it's the board's turn to start again, do we go back to the community with more engagement or is the board ready to start saying, I think this is what the long range plan looks like. It's not a commitment to phasing necessarily or

166money. It's just saying, okay, if we look at the next 20 years, kind of to your earlier question, are we gearing up for two campuses? Are we looking at one campus? What's the will of the community telling us? And then what does that mean for our plan? How do we start to fill in and and put build it out? Yep. Build it out a little bit. And then this timeline gets you if you wanted to. We are not here to tell you you need to. But then the next time that your school board could put something on a ballot conceivably related to this would be next April. It's not us telling you you have to do that or should do that. We just built the timeline so that you could see what you would have

167to do if that would be the case. If you would like to go further out than that or you're not planning to go to referendum, maybe you have other funding sources available to the district through donations or district funds, you could really commence your plan at any point in time. The timeline could be moved, you know, lengthened in some areas or changed to meet different needs or add another phase of, you know, you tweak again, then you maybe do more surveying or something. So, there are options to do here, but we just wanted to kind of lay out for you in chunks what that would most likely need to look like if you were going to target looking to the community in April for facilities purposes. So, I I'd like to just add a layer

168and not for confusion's sake, but there are real um budgetary considerations and concerns that we have to think about alongside of the refer this process uh based on the last referendum. I want to remind you that the ask that we made to the community was for 7 million um continuously uh to fund our school district into the future. that was also predicated on we were going to cut $1.5 million out of the budget and as I shared um with the community part of that $ 1.5 million on an operational budget was a closure of one of our schools right that was configured into that part of that 1.5 million u if we continue to move forward right and if we want to keep all five buildings open and maintained and if that's your your suggestion

169question or solution. I want you to know what kind of ask that you might be asking the school district for because it would be more than that on an operating annual basis. Okay? Just so that you're aware of what that looks like. I'm not saying that it can't happen or that I'm advising against it at this point in time, but I do know that given the feedback and given what our community needs are in the letter I put out, um we may be forced to close more than that without a plan. Um if we uh can't continue to operate, okay, more than that one building and that one building was baked into the ask we asked last time. all things are possible, right? Um especially if there's a community behind it and we get community

170input. Um but I I want to give you some another check-in as to what has already transpired and the feedback we've already gotten in certain avenues and uh help direct me uh and and our our teams that we work with to get us on the right path for what the community wants. And then we will produce what we can for you uh in regard to those discussion points. So I I've heard some discussion around the table about some of the questions that people would like to have answered. Um, is there a I mean a situation where we feel as a board we want to uh give the administration perhaps some homework to take uh one or two different scenarios here and say, "Hey, can you figure out what the cost savings um administratively um or

171staffwise? it would mean if we went to these types of um phases, these types of plans, is that is that something that we can we we want to have a discussion about at this time or do we need to still have another meeting to have further discussion on on this? Are you saying of of the choices provided today? Correct. having them put together. Yes. Is there is right now we've we've done a lot of talking and explaining about the history of where we where we've been and how we came to these particular uh one or two campus solutions. Uh are we soliciting feedback at this time uh from from the board as far as what they think of these particular solutions? Are we seeking more information to be able to come to that conclusion? Are

172you looking for us to weigh in on this? Yes. Should Should weigh in on this at this time? Okay. Well, I guess I'll start and maybe go around the table. Um I I believe we the the one or two campus solution is I've not seen a a clear case for this being a positive economically or um for for the the community. Um and I'd like to see different options uh that are that are less um extreme. Uh, I'd like to look at, uh, it sounds like the middle school has some serious maintenance issues. Um, you know, we may not be in a position to build a different middle school or add on someplace else. But, um, we need to explore our options there because the water doesn't wait for anyone. uh and and you've got

173the the added behavioral issues that are are linked to no sunlight in the school. Um so I I would like to see something done planwise with the middle school, whatever that looks like. Um I'm open to to that. Um, and then, uh, seeing what we can do to to save money. Um, as far as, uh, electrical efficiencies, that's 50% of our cost is is is utilities. That's that's a lot of money. And, uh, can we be saving money by changing to something more efficient? Sometimes your payback app is very quick on that. Um, so I'd like to explore that. to see what savings we can get. Can I ask you a clarifying question then? Um you you made the statement that uh you have not seen the cost savings or benefit the the the value

174statement of a one or two campus model, right? um are you seeking more information about that particular um model or are you seeking are you you just you're opposed to that model generally? I think I'm I'm going to what Charity said really resonated with me. Okay. People People value their neighborhood schools and I think we're going to lose something generational if we just, you know, blow them all away and start over. Yeah. Um I'll definitely echo what Lori said. I think that is very true. Uh, I think that closing elementary schools um can do some actually do some damage to uh the cohesion of the culture of Watertown. Um, but I also think that if there is any school that we should look at further options with, it's the middle school. I think that's the

175odd one out. Um, I think that of the existing options, you know, the only thing that I would say is look at there are two options that have uh the lowest net total spending. Those are options C and D. Um, but even then, those are pretty substantial. And I think that if we're saying, "Oh, hey guys, uh, you know that school that you went to and you have really fond memories of, we're going to close it down and sell it to a high fructose corn syrup company or something like that, I think." And people go, "Oh, okay. You're going to do that and that's going to save us money." And you're and we go, "No, that's going to cost us $15 million. I think that's going to make people just unconscionably upset, the idea that

176we would take money from them to destroy a piece of their memory." Um, so yeah, I mean, I I would generally e echo what Lori said. Um but they it might turn out that considering the long-term effects of not closing any of the schools and not moving forward like this has hidden costs associated with it that end up being huge problems for people down the line. So looking at the least expensive options is is what I would go for if that's something that we really feel like we need to move towards eventually. I still like option Z and you know I I'm I'm all about nostalgia but you know we got to look at the bottom line and I think uh I'm okay with closing these schools down. I didn't grow up and go to

177any of those schools, but um in 20 years, most of those people did anyway. Right. But so I like looking at me. She spoke. No, I'm sorry for being callous, but the u the numbers are what we have to look at and uh the future numbers and option D and one campus solution if we can if we can work out the transportation um we'll save a lot of money that way as well. So, I like that. I'll wait to go to LA go last because people have heard a lot from me. So, Um, I'm really not comfortable with the one campus solution just because of all the community members I've spoken with, I have not I'm yet to speak to one that's on board. Now, that's not to say that they wouldn't be on board

178when they understand the whole plan, but I I couldn't vote for a one campus solution if everybody I speak to in the community is telling me that they're adamantly against it. So, I I just received the packet. I need to go through it. Okay. I got it today. But if I can't get the community buy in, I can't I can't vote for a one campus solution. I'm next. Yeah. Yeah. The numbers don't lie. I'm not for closing down any schools. I hate that. But the numbers don't lie. And I am going to after I get done doing all my extensions, which I should get done in August, I am going to study this thoroughly and come up with a fiscal decision and then I'll argue like hell with all. That's all I have to say.

179I mean, I think for me, one of my biggest questions is any of these plans, are they going to be pending the successful the passing of a facilities referendum? You know, because we know that Jared, to your point, you have you have things that you've already kind of potentially started to strategically think about and plan for knowing that there without an operational referendum passing, we're going to have cuts for multiple years. So, that's part of it. Secondarily, you had mentioned that some districts have alternative funding sources. um you know, is that something that we have available to us? Have there been any conversations around it? I mean, I'm not saying corporate naming rights where all of a sudden we're going to have Johnsonville High School or something like that, but I mean, good thinking about

180that happen. I mean, but I mean, I'm sure there that's not outside of those bounds to ask. Um uh we we do have uh and and we we we've pulled together a group of uh business uh people um more more related to both a and um manufacturing. Um but those are our two largest industries around here that we really leaned into and asked to come. Um and uh we also invited the uh then mayor at the time um Nick McFarland um and um Senator Jaggler came and we talked a lot about um funding of schools um and we talked about um our needs to uh move things forward even on a micro level. uh on a micro level we need to do something at the high school around our CTE programming and and some of

181the space needs that are there right but we also talked about a larger um component um we had um Mr. Benson there from uh you know uh the um the found yeah Benson family foundation who was interested in helping out but all of them said really uh get your work done with the community first. We're not going to put money into something that we don't feel um the community looks at and wants to support. So, they want to get our ducks in a row and get the uh at least the first phase uh going with the community and understand that we have a community support for what we're looking at as a long-term phrase before they want to do any of that large kind of investment. Uh they're happy to invest and they do. you

182see it um at just about every board meeting. Um donations to programming and everything else, but a large donation like millions of millions of dollars um we're talking about um that's going to come after um they know that the community is behind whatever it is. Um, so the other the other thing that I'll say to your point is we know uh whatever we do uh we are in serious need of operating heating dollars just to keep our our our facilities uh not just our facilities but our programming going. Uh and then on top of that because we are having a hard time just funding our operations. We keep getting more and more behind on the maintenance of the buildings that we have. And so that creates a larger hole and a larger debt that we

183don't have a budget for. Um like most families, um not all but most families, if I need a new roof, I have to go to the bank to get that money, right? I don't necessarily have a savings account that I can always dip into, right? And that's a lot of our families right now. Um school is the same way. We have money to do some of the day-to-day stuff, but we don't have a huge pot of money that we can go to for a large roughing project like that, you know, and you know, I we may have a half a million to a million dollars to do some small reconfiguring or whatever else, but to do a large roofing project or a large heating project that needs to be done because those boilers got to

184age, um, we're looking at that. Right? The high school was built in '92, right? Going to need a new roof soon. Need a new heating plant soon. Those things just age out. And so that's really what the heartbeat of today's topic is. Like not only not only do we want to plan for how do we take care of those things in the future, but what kind of legacy do we want to leave uh for future generations to support as they move forward? you know, in the 90s that was a new high school and what that brought to our community. If that group didn't come around and say, "We need a new high school," we'd still be running high school out of here. You know, where the Y is, right? Uh and so, um we just

185have to continually think what is our the legacy of this board, right? The legacy of my leadership and working with con, uh our construction, uh group and our architectures. What kind of a vision do we have for the future? And does the community support that? So I guess the only other thing that I have then is would it be worthwhile as we're considering I mean hearing a lot of people say we want to hear from the community and what those next steps would be that we have representatives from the city the community some of those potential supporting businesses to all be at the same space in the same time hearing the same community messages so there's you know full transparency in that moment rather than you know filtering different messages and having different set of

186conversations with the different communities. Yeah. I mean, I don't know what folks think about. I mean, I'm fine with I think no problem with that. If we move forward, let's say we pick plan D. How would that look next year for the referendum? Would you put an operational end of new building expense referendum on the same ballot? And would that be those are the discussions that we really have to have between now and October, November at the latest. um because that's that's why we're we're really looking at some of these things and um having some of the community discussions and everything else u quicker and on the front end uh will help you make those decisions. If we can't get to that kind of uh resolution quicker and it takes more time, we will have

187to do something with the operational referendum before we even get to a a facilities referendum. We can't do those then in tandem. And it gets harder to t to plan for whatever the ask is, right? I know that the last board said it's really more important for us right now to focus on keeping our doors open than to discuss what how we want to maintain those buildings and or reconfigure them in the future. That's why we paused, right? we we paused and put all of our our messaging around trying to understand what the referendum means uh for operating our our our programming. So I have a couple of observations here. Um the fact is we're operating a school district in a situation where we're in survival mode. Um we're we're we're trying to save as

188many resources as we possibly can moving forward as a result of the old referendum. Uh what some people uh might not understand is if we move forward with a u a building referendum that has a different treatment to the to the uh to the mill rate than just an operational referendum per se. uh where that where let's say when if we're looking at houses or commercial buildings, we would say we would amortize that uh over the course of a 20-year period. Well, this gets loving in the form of not always, right? Well, not always. On a commercial building, it would be roughly 20 years. just got to I'm just using 20 years as a as a number because that's a roughly about the that's that's what it would take to you got to convince me

189that a 20-year bond cycle for a a district the bonding yes right that's what I'm that's why I'm throwing that so um that cost breakdown is going to be very different uh to how the taxpayers are going to feel that and they can really benefit benefit from from the uh reap the rewards of that pretty pretty quickly then too with a growing community. Um, I think that really as long term as a district, we need to be looking at um how we utilize our resources efficiently moving in forward in the future because that means extra resources that we can employ in the classroom, extra programs that we can uh so we may have to experience a little bit of pain now, but long term we can set ourselves up for a lot of success. Um,

190yeah, I agree, Craig. But people generally like local elementary schools. Just like populist society. Again, here's here's my belief though that um in our in our frugal community, the the community doesn't have the the means to support um multiple different smaller buildings throughout the the greater Watertown community. They just don't factually that's what the numbers are showing. they just don't have but on the converse when you have when you have um other resources like for instance take the example of snow plowing if you if you can avoid having uh our staff running all over like the county trying to clear snow but rather they're focused on one particular space now they get that job done a lot more quickly and they're not putting their lives in danger traveling to the next uh next place and

191frantically trying to get it all done. Uh it's it's all right there right now. Now take now take an example of uh our district that happens to be utilizing our uh school resource officers. Now, instead of having potentially four or five of them scattered throughout the district proper, uh you can maybe go down to three of them into or two of them in a in a one campus solution. Now, you're not think that it would be advantageous to go down to two resource offices. Perhaps not. I'm just using body of 3200. I'm using it as an example. He's throwing out random figures for an illustration. you're if you happen to have those police resources in one spot that acts more as a deterrent for safety. The same thing is true about school nurses and and

192other individuals. I mean, it's less less um less administration. you know, you can get by with one building principal and several associate principles which cost less. There's there's all sorts of intangible benefits to happening to have those buildings set up in that way and you can have a gorgeous building. Uh so I think I think in my opinion I would support uh option D but I feel like maybe there's an option in C++ and that C++ might involve we knew that was coming might involve phase one being a uh a prek on on the high school north the side of the high school site where that would be an expandable um building, but then that gives the leeway to to offer uh a programmatic support for an egg program there and have that done right

193right off the get-go. Um and then you have you have that that culture um right there at that particular building. And that gives us options to being able to uh grow the build the the district as as the district can grow afford to grow as well. Um so maybe that's an option. Uh and and unfortunately we don't have all of the voices at the table either. Um so hopefully we can have another opportunity at some point. Sam. Yeah. So, um, in response to a few of the things that you've talked about, uh, first of all, I think that it's important that we clarify that a huge part of what we're dealing with is the ultimate consequence of years of printing money and inflation coming to a head uh, when it comes to rising costs uh,

194across the board. Um, it's not just that we had a failed referendum. really is uh mismanagement of uh mismanagement of economic uh responsibilities by state and federal governments for a long time um especially through co that was deferred for quite a number of years and we're really coming out of that cycle and we're experiencing those deferred consequences that uh that were that were alleviated by some of those uh extra co funds that were coming to schools uh among other things. The other element is although I agree with you and I actually feel very strongly in uh in the areas that you're talking about with um uh maintaining uh smaller campuses so that you can have simpler snow plowing operations and having consolidated uh resource officers and things of that nature. I think that when we're

195talking about this from a community perspective, those are all not nearly as fundamental on the hierarchy of needs. And I think that at the end of the day, you have to look at the cost. And if we are not able to get one of these options within a stones throw of the maintenance cost, the flatout maintenance cost, I don't think people are going to be interested in it. And what I'm interested in doing is putting an option forward to the community that the community will say, "Oh, yeah. I think that sounds good." If we don't have an option that the community is going to think, "Oh, hey, that sounds good. I don't know why we're even gonna bother putting it on a ballot because we don't want to see people just vote something down. So,

196we have very we have to be very conscientious of that. And I mean, I agree with Carl. You said the numbers don't lie. I don't like school closures, but the numbers don't lie. It makes sense. I do agree with that as well. But school closures don't necessarily equivocate to making new structures and building new. Yeah. the most the most economically frugal plan is to go with maintenance and school closures. I'm not recommending it. I'm just saying that of all the options, that's the the furthest on the frugal side of the spectrum. And I think that's uh I think we got to be careful because although I I I understand what you're saying about a long-term legacy, I don't think that if there's a huge power outage and a terrible snowstorm in the middle of winter

197in northern Wisconsin, I might have a really nice chair, but if I'm going to die if I don't chop that chair up and turn it into firewood, maybe it's an antique, maybe it's worth a lot of money, but my life is worth a lot more. We got to think about what's going to keep the school system fundamentally on for the future. And I don't know that some of these bigger plans are going to end up doing that. I think I think that's the that's the question, Sam. I think we all have different perspectives on on what that means, you know, fundamentally for the future. Is this true? Yeah. Um because the the the path that we're on right now, our fundamental future does look like closing two to three buildings just to keep the fire

198going, right? Yeah. Then is that an option that we need to have prepared and available prior to public community meetings to say, you know, if we take these three schools down, you know, this is what the the cost savings would be from those three schools plus what the continued maintenance just baseline maintenance would be for the remaining to to have that available as an option for people or do we not want to put that forward for the community as an option? you know the there's different points uh you know dropping off points that you get to in that discussion right because you can see uh just closing a building and moving the staffing to another building and continuing the programming that's not a huge annual savings right I think the the the largest school was

199uh from the elementary side anyway obviously the high school and middle school would be larger but from an elementary standpoint West was Webster at 187,000 a year, right? In the grand scheme of millions of dollars that we need to cut, that's not going to help us. Adding them all up to $800,000 if we close them all isn't going to amount to anything. The real the real thing that people need to understand is it's not just closing a a facility. is the changing dramatically of the programming and the fewer amounts of people to run that programming that people aren't really hearing right now. And I've shared that when we talk about going down 60 to 80 staff members, 40 some of which would be teachers, right? People need to hear that. I I'm not saying that

200as a threat. I'm saying that is a real reality that we are living right now if we don't get some kind of revenue in. That is our real reality and those are the realities that our administrative team are trying to put together in as cohesive of a plan as we can for you. We're also looking at uh a stairst step of approach to what that looks like. Maybe get some money as a referendum, right? Um but still have to make large cuts, right? So instead of 60 80 staff members, we're talking 40 to 50 and and maybe only 20 some of them being teachers, right? still huge changes to our programming across the board with that ammo, but I need people to understand where we are if we don't have what we asked for in

201April. Is that a conversation that can piggy back with these with these community activities? It's a both hand. there's an opportunity to talk about the operational needs and talk about facilities recognizing they're independent conversations but like oh I mean I think that that could strategically play into passing the operational referendum right because if you start with the large ass we want new buildings and then defer to but we need this operational referendum you might get a more community members to vote for the referendum but pooy on the maintenance plan referendum. So, I don't know if we want to combine the two unless the goal is to solely focus on the operational, right? Because if somebody asks you to borrow $20 and you're like, "No, no." And then they're like, "Oh, I've made five bucks." And

202then you feel little obligation, right? Like you'd be like, "All right, I guess I can give you five bucks." Right? So, we don't really want to introduce the conversation like that to the community. That would be a conservative fine if we combined them. So, I mean, I hear what you're saying and you know, it's a it's such a when we when we say we we need an operational reper operational referendum. Yes, we need that. But in order for us to do not only that, but future planning for the expenses and maintenance of of the buildings that um for whatever reason past boards have uh neglected to uh get involved with. Um, there's there needs to be a capital improvement referendum as well. I'm not saying there doesn't need to be. I'm just saying I'm not

203sure we want to have that conversation on the same night in the same room is all I'm saying. I can agree with that. I mean, I know that I know that that seems to confuse people when people seem to to take it as you you want an operational referendum, but then then you have a capital referendum that you're talking about. Like that's a rerun of what we just did. Right. Right. Unfortunately, timing is a factor. So, yes, Carl. Greg, do we These people been sitting here. Can they same thing, Carl? Well, I know he's the local, but I mean, I got more respect for you than that. I mean, we're we're sitting here debating now. So, um, and did you guys I don't know did did were there any other questions for P and that

204that you had in the presentation or Yeah, thank you very much. We have um been scribing down questions that were asked like earlier throughout the presentation. So, we'll review all of that. I think some of them might have been answered as we kept going a little bit, but we have them down. So, we'll work with Jared and the team on that. And then we also, you know, just took notes on the conversation um that you all just had. So, we'll review that as well. Review that, regroup on some of that. And then I think we'll wait to hear from Jared and the team about the next steps with you as a board. You know, is that us coming back or a little Q&A followup and, you know, some next steps together? Is that something you

205as a board want to do? So, those will be things you guys can let us know about. And and honestly to Oh, go ahead. I'm sorry. Do you have a certified energy manager on your team? We do not. Do we use one as part of our I thought one of that actually may not be true. Our engineers may have Let me get back to you on that. Our electrical engineering team may Okay. Thank you. So, um, you know, to Carl's point, uh, I believe, um, we accomplished a lot today and some of you are going from zero to 120 miles per hour. It may be good to just take a pause, call another meeting fairly quickly uh within the next couple of weeks to then set the course for the rest of the summer's work

206and maybe some ideas of where the board wants to go into the future uh whatever whatever future referendum we may be talking about. And I honestly uh when I say this to you, I honestly don't see us moving forward without trying to continue to ask our public to put more support in. Right? If our states not there um and we're seeing dwindling resources coming from the federal government, we've got to do something. And I will I will tell you this one last time. I will I will work uh to make sure that this business fits into any budget that's available to it. And I want to remind you that we're in the business of serving kids in their education moving forward. And I will always try to do that with the most amount of efficiencies

207that are available to us and money. But it will come with very much a change in programming if we don't do something different. We're on we're on a path that is unsustainable. Um, thank you very much. Yeah, thank you for coming. [Music] I'm going to be checking out all the info you gave me. Was there any further discussion with the board or No discuss. All right. Do I hear a motion to adjurnn? Motion. I'll second. Motion by Sam, seconded by Tammy. All those in favor? I opposed and motion please stand adjourned.