School district seeks residents’ input
By Erik Buchinger
The Clintonville School Board discussed holding community input nights regarding a potential 2020 referendum.
The board is in the process of hiring a firm that would provide analysis of the district’s facilities, associated community engagement and bond referendum campaign services.
The district leadership and firm would host various public meetings to involve citizens of the district in all levels of the proposed project.
“I think there is no problem with doing this any time, but if we are hiring the professionals, we might want to have their input and at least listen to them,” School Board President Ben Huber said during a Jan. 28 school board meeting.
The school already held a community conversation circle in October to discuss the school district’s needs and wants with the community.
Board member Larry Czarnecki recommended bringing the original group from the October meeting back for additional feedback.
“I don’t know that you can over-communicate,” Czarnecki said. “One of my thoughts was to have another meeting with the same groups we had the first time to provide any feedback of things that were brought up.”
Czarnecki suggested additional conversation circles with other groups to get more of the community involved.
Additionally, Huber recommended using feedback from the previous referendum process conducted by the community task force.
The district’s administrative team compiled the feedback from the previous community circle meeting, Superintendent David Dyb said.
“If we have one before April, we could take this to that group, invite them back and say here is an update on what has been addressed relative to the findings from October,” Dyb said. “The second piece is whether we all still feel these are relevant from a facilities question.”
Huber said he would be concerned about holding too many community meetings.
“The one thing I might caution about having one in the next month or two – many of the firms we are considering hiring will have their own plans for meetings,” Huber said. “We don’t want community burnout either.”
Board member Kris Strauman said people should know what has been done since the last meeting.
“I don’t think you’d get burnout, but I like Larry’s idea because this was back in October,” Strauman said. “They’ve heard nothing, and people are going to say, ‘Well what good was that?’ Because they haven’t heard anything back. This way, they’ll see, and when we get to those other meetings from the [request for proposal], then they might be more apt to come back or new people can come back.”
Business Manager Holly Burr said holding off on a community meeting until the firm is hired would be too long to wait.
“Just a timeline issue – if we’re looking at this and we hire them in mid-March or early April, they’re not going to have their assessment done or a report back to us till mid-May or June,” Burr said. “That’s too long to not do something in my opinion.”
Dyb recommended a late February or early March timeline for the next community circle discussion.
He said the administration team will decide on potential dates for the next meeting.
“I’d like to send a personal email out to the people that attended the first time and broadcast to the group before to people who did not attend,” Dyb said. “There were a number of people who could not attend that would like to attend the next one. We’ll take whoever would like to come. If we get 25, great, and if we get 45, even better.”
School district seeks requests for proposals
During that same school board meeting, the board authorized Burr to send requests for proposals as part of the facilities concepts planning process.
The district seeks a firm that will provide analysis of its facilities, associated community engagement and bond referendum campaign services.
“This is just the preliminary stuff with the design, helping community engagement, the pre-referendum work,” Burr said. “The architects will come in and do the facility analysis, which we have a really decent one from last time for Rexford-Longfellow, but not for the other three buildings from what I found. That’s something I will stress.”
In the proposal, it stated the facility analysis should address the following:
• Quality learning and work environments.
• Safe, secure, environmentally-friendly facilities that foster teaching and learning.
• Healthy learning and work environments including appropriate lighting and indoor air quality.
• Maximum school and community use of facilities and sites.
• Cost-effective solutions for new space and infrastructure.
The proposal listed a tentative schedule of a Feb. 20 deadline to receive written proposals, March 4 for interviewing selected finalists and March 11 for the school board making an offer to a firm.
“It is an aggressive timeline, but with your approval, we’re ready to move forward to see what type of response we get,” Dyb said.
Existing documents and studies the district has completed include a capacity study, community survey and facility assessment of Rexford-Longfellow.
The scope of services includes the firm developing costs for solutions that include remodeling and/or expansion of the existing spaces and cost of new construction.
Dyb and Huber said they were both contacted by three different companies interested in bidding for the proposal.