At the most recent school board meeting, two groups gave presentations to the board about how they would lead a community engagement process related to our master facilities plan. I’d like to explain some of the background to those presentations and why we are considering this at this time.

Constructing, and sometimes renovating, school buildings is one of the largest responsibilities of a school district. There is a state agency known as the Ohio Schools Facilities Commission that provides technical assistance, and, most importantly, also helps to pay part of the cost. The commission started with the poorest districts in Ohio, to which it offers a larger share of construction or renovation costs, and is working its way through all of Ohio’s more than 600 school districts.

Sometime in the next 18 months, it’s likely the commission will reach our district, and begin a process in which it would offer to fund about one fourth of the cost of any school construction or renovation we are planning to undertake.

We need to have a master facilities plan prepared by the time this OSFC funding becomes available, in order to assess whether that funding is appropriate and cost-effective for the district, and to be able to move ahead expeditiously if OSFC funding is to be utilized. As a key part of preparing that master facilities plan, we want input from all of our residents and other stakeholders, including parents, businesses, staff and students.

We often seek input from the community. Just in the last few weeks, we’ve done surveys on both the high school class schedule and the district’s dress code. But a master facilities plan is different. Decisions about school construction can run into the tens of millions of dollars. We are envisioning a community engagement process that will take six to 12 months and let us know what large numbers of stakeholders in our schools feel that plan should look like. 

There are companies that specialize in this kind of work, and use tools like online and telephone surveys, focus groups, large-group and small-group meetings, interactive web sites, social networking media, individual in-depth interviews, workshops, community forums and others. It’s important to know when and how to use these tools, and that is the expertise they bring. Each of these companies is also partnering with an architect experienced in school construction, because as the community engagement work begins, the conversation revolves around many issues that require architectural knowledge specifically related to schools.

We need to find out from our community its thoughts on issues such as new construction vs. renovation, the division of grades between buildings, number and timing of transitions between schools, determining which existing facilities, if any, should be replaced, the disposition of any facilities being replaced, and a location for any new construction.

Sometime over the next month or so the school board plans to select one of the companies to guide this community engagement process. When it begins, everyone in our community will have many opportunities for substantial and significant input into the plan for the schools that our children will attend for the coming decades.

Published in the Fairfield Echo, Dec. 17, 2009.