Swallow School Facilities Advisory Committee Prepares Recommendations for the Board of Education
For the second time this month the Swallow School Facility Advisory Committee (FAC) met to prepare recommendations to the school board on a long-range master facilities plan. Following the reveal of three initial design concepts at its meeting March 8, with more information about the district’s financial position and funding options for the plan, five additional renditions were created that move closer to the identified needs and priorities of: creating distributed collaboration space (breakout spaces), allowing for flexible configurations of classrooms and furnishings to support varied curriculum and instruction, offering spaces to support increased hands-on learning, technology, and student collaboration, creating a single level accessible building, reconfiguring the building for better community use (bathrooms, location of large project/meeting rooms) and attending to the known maintenance and capital needs.
Committee members narrowed these concepts from eight down to two and plan to have one last review at the April l2th meeting.
Based on this work, the FAC continued to refine a survey in collaboration with School Perceptions LLC that will provide each district taxpayer the chance to provide feedback on the FAC’s recommendation. Survey data would then be used by the school board to determine next steps.
“All of the long-range master facilities concepts create the kinds of spaces our teachers, students, and parents have asked for and know will best support our future programming needs while allowing the district to maintain our building,” said Dr. Melissa Thompson, Superintendent of the Swallow School District. “Through a consensus-based process, the FAC has narrowed its focus to a few final concepts to review with some requested updates and costing. By making great use of the expertise and innovation of our consultants and the guidance of the community via the
Community Conversations series, I am confident they will be able to make a recommendation to the school board in April.”
Members of the community are encouraged to visit the school district’s website
www.swallowschool.org for further information, which is available in the Board of Education section under
Long-Range Planning. The next Facility Advisory Committee Meeting will be held Thursday, April 12 at 6:30pm in the Library at Swallow School.