More Facilities Info

It's Labor Day weekend and I decided to labor by reorganizing my upstairs files. Naturally, most of it is SPS information. It's a little overwhelming trying to look through and then decide what to keep. However, at the end, less paper and more organization.

And you know what? You never know what you might find. I've found information that, at the time, was not so important and now, after the Auditor's report, might be quite useful. But all that requires more work before disclosure.

However, I thought I would pass along some info that I've come across to put on your radar as we move towards planning BEX IV.

Having done nearly all the high schools (sorry, RBHS, Sealth and Ingraham; although Sealth just got quite a nice upgrade) and a couple of middle schools, it seems like BEX IV will be heavy on elementary schools. (I do believe the district is likely to do either Eckstein or Whitman or Washington under BEX IV but given the huge amounts we need to spend now on middle schools, I can't believe they could do more than one or two.)

Also, as I mentioned at that thread, the district is talking about doing more cookie-cutter buildings (maybe 3 blueprints and they pick the one that fits the footprint best). It saves a lot of money.

I found this document from March 2007 called Property Management Plan. It was an analysis done to give to the School Board to make recommendations for the recently closed buildings. Open schools are called "essential". Non-in-use buildings in SPS get assigned a label (which changes a bit but I think this is right): interim/emergency, inventory or surplus. (I won't be mentioning surplus/inventory buildings this thread.)

Interim is clearly for buildings to be used while other buildings are being renovated. At the time of this report, they were Lincoln, Boren, Sand Point and McDonald. Obviously, Sand Point and McDonald haven't be used in a long time as interims and now, are reopening as essential buildings. (Another issue to this is that Lincoln is getting really worn down from constant use as an interim. The District will have to pour some more money in there at some point to safely continue its use.)

So I'm guessing that Magnolia and Hughes are our new interims for elementaries except that both are in poor shape.

One interesting note from the report, "Schools that are significantly less than 4 acres (the District's SMP minimum size standard) are considered too small and should be surplused, unless they have an adjacent park which can be used as a playground. Thus the McDonald and MLK, Jr. sites are too small to house a regular program." Oh, so what changed? And, they kept mentioning in this report that McDonald is a likely building for an SBOC move.

The report rightly points out that they need to build bigger and, of course, only at sites that can support that growth. "At most sites those schools can be expanded to 535 seats, which may create substantial additional capacity." So to point out, they will not be building any "small" schools, certainly nothing under 400-450. They also point out that "Schools that remain open and were built prior to 1960 are highly likely to need a renovation by 2030." That's about 57 buildings.

So the schools that this report talks up for renovation are:

NE: Olympic Hills, Rogers and View Ridge (I might have thrown in Laurelhurst.)

NW: Bagley and North Beach

Central: they don't mention anyplace but I might put in a plug for Meany. I hope by the time BEX IV rolls around, the district makes a final and lasting decision on where Nova and SBOC will live if Meany isn't it. Those programs deserve better.

QA/Magnolia: North Queen Anne and Magnolia. (However they note if SBOC moved, then Old Hay would be used and one of those would be declared surplus). I'm not sure what, if anything might be done here under BEX IV. Maybe McClure or Blaine?)

SW: They say this area has too much capacity (but this was before closing Pathfinder's old home). Nothing is suggested here. If I had to put out a name it would be Arbor Heights.

SE: Again, they are discussing life before 2010, so South Shore now has its own building, Orca is in Columbia and we are reopening Rainier View.

One issue to keep in mind is that the entire south end has had more buildings renovated/rebuilt than the north end. It is likely that even with the district trying to be fair to all areas, at the state of facilities right now, they will have to do those buildings that are the most urgent.

I know that Magnolia may be considered an emergency site but Magnolia is pretty far off the beaten path for that purpose according to the district. Maybe John Marshall is now an emergency building? So we only have North Queen Anne, Hughes and Magnolia to be possible interim elementary sites. If they don't use Boren again as an interim, it could be the emergency site for a middle/high school.

If your school is old and rundown, I would seriously consider organizing your PTA to lobby to be on BEX IV. I have a feeling it is going to be a dogfight in figuring out capacity needs versus outright safety and building condition needs. I think most school communities have not been pro-active in this and now that the situation is getting more and more desperate, you might want to act.