Sean C. Morgan
School District 55’s Facility Planning Committee is developing a survey to help figure out community attitudes toward long-range planning for its facilities.
Subcommittees continued sharing information with the full committee during a meeting held Thursday night.
The community subcommittee provided a draft survey that focused heavily on transportation issues at the meeting.
Hawthorne teacher Brett Bowers said the committee was open to suggestions for questions and how best to use the survey. Members of the Facility Planning Committee will send suggestions for developing the survey over the next couple of weeks.
The survey is supposed to provide information to the School Board about community attitudes.
The subcommittee should have a final survey ready to go by the time the Facility Planning Committee meets again on March 18.
The Facility Planning Committee is charged with learning about and projecting facility needs over the next 20 years. This may include a range of options from closing a school to constructing new buildings.
In the short term, the committee is looking at options with Holley and Crawfordsville schools, which are the most expensive schools per student to operate. The district chose not to follow through on a proposal to reorganize those schools last year.
The Facility Planning Committee will develop a report and recommendation for the School Board’s consideration.
Transportation Supervisor L.D. Ellison outlined issues facing transportation, existing and future. He provided maps of the district’s attendance boundaries and pin pointed the location of each student in the district, showing and explaining how routes move some 1,600 students each day.
Among the issues transportation deals with now are students who are “grandfathered” into schools outside their attendance boundaries. With the last boundary change, the district allowed siblings of students to attend the same schools, so the district has a number of in-district transfers that complicate routing.
“My concern is if you change boundaries, you need to check the dynamics,” Ellison said. The grandfathering “creates nightmares for routing.”
Essentially, Ellison said, transportation will react to the ideas of the Planning Committee rather than drive them.
No matter how attendance boundaries are changed though, it is unlikely to have a large impact on cost, facilitator Greg McKenzie said. The same number of students are still going to the same number of schools.
One change that could help streamline the transportation system would be staggered bell times, Ellison said. Ideally, there would be a half hour or 45 minutes between bell times at different schools.
Staggered bell times help the buses “sweep” across the district from school to school and cut down on waiting times thus total riding time, Ellison said. The most efficient change that could be made for transportation would be staggered bell times.
In one case, Ellison has received a complaint about a student who rides for 75 minutes from Oak Heights to the Liberty area.
On Highway 228, a person could watch in the morning and see six to seven different buses headed to Crawfordsville and Holley from different areas, Ellison said. “There is some huge inefficiency.”
Students in outlying areas are clustered along main roads for the most part, Ellison said. The ones that become issues are the single students picked up even farther out.
Committee member Karla Hall told the committee that one of the questions she is constantly asked is why spending cuts are made in education instead of sports.
She suggested that before closing a school, the district cut sports programs.
“There’s a certain percentage that would agree with you,” Supt. Larry Horton said. “My guess is ? if we closed a school, you’re going to have far fewer people complaining than if you closed down sports. I’m not saying I’m right or wrong.”
“We need to think about their education before we think about their sports,” Hall said.
The district did cut sports programs last year, and the board room was full, Supt. Horton said. When it talked about reorganizing Holley and Crawfordsville, the board room was full.
In a room full of some 150 state superintendents, Supt. Horton said, he suggested that if all districts in the state were to shut down sports funding, “it would be funded, I have no doubt in my mind.”
Probably two of the most volatile issues across the state are cutting sports an closing schools, McKenzie told the committee.
The committee will meet next at 7 p.m. on March 18 to begin deciding how to use the information it has gathered and to review the community survey.