St. Charles School Board looking at district’s building needs for long-range plan

The St. Charles District 303 School Board wants to make sure the district’s buildings are meeting the needs of the district now and into the future.

An educational facility planning committee, comprised of community and staff members, has been working to develop a comprehensive long-range Educational Facilities Master Plan. The last time the plan was updated was in 2008.

The committee has been looking at priorities such as ensuring that all learning spaces within the district are equal; accommodating educational programming needs at each of the buildings; addressing accessibility issues in some of the district’s buildings; and addressing or improving students’ safety and security across the district.

“We need an idea of what the board values and a ranking of what the board values,” Justin Attaway, the district’s assistant superintendent for business services and chief financial officer, told board members during the board’s retreat July 9. “Because as we’re considering what we’re going to do for projects and how money is going to be allocated, we need some way of balancing that. There’s a laundry list of items that we can do, but we need some way to figure out what the importance level of each of those items are.”

Attaway talked about plans for a consultant to do enrollment projections and a capacity utilization analysis of all of the district’s buildings.

“Both of those items are really important and really need to go hand in hand,” he said. ‘We can’t talk enrollment projections until we know what type of space we really truly have available in our buildings.”

Part of that study will involve going in and figuring out how the district currently is using buildings, how much space the district has now and how much space the district could have depending on what the district does with certain programming.

“While a special program may exist at one building, there may be benefits to moving that to another building that may free up space at a certain building where we’re getting overcrowding,” Attaway said. “We really need to understand the capacity of our buildings, current and potential, before we talk about enrollment analysis because we don’t know where our pressure points are until we know how much space could be available at the buildings.”

Superintendent Paul Gordon also spoke about the importance of using a demographer to help the district plan for the future.

“We critically need that demographer to come in and really give us a deep analysis of where we are going, what we are doing and how that student enrollment is not only going to look today, but also tomorrow,” Gordon said.