 What's going to flood first? It's wonderful to see so many things for a year. Unfortunately, we all have it as a matter of fact. That's right. Afternoon. I said, oh, we have more. That's fantastic. So I'm Libby Bonesteel. I'm the superintendent of schools. Some of you I know quite well, and some of you I haven't seen before and met. So please take some time to come over and say hi. We know how to do it. I haven't met you as of yet. We're going to be here for a little bit with our friends Drew at Collins, and I'll let them introduce themselves, as well as Andrew and our friends here. And today, the purpose of today is to set the context of why we're talking about facilities in this way, and why we're looking at master plan kind of possibilities. There's several factors, some very real and inner faces right now, and some imagining and dreaming for the future, as well. So the Voice for Drex are going to talk us through that. I'll talk about some education trends. We'll talk about some climate resiliency pieces and mitigation, and put it all together for you today. But it's also a time for you to ask questions. So please feel free. We're a relatively small group. Please feel free to ask questions that you think your neighbors might have, or you might have yourself, so that we can all get it down. It is being videotaped by Orca. Thank you, Orca. And we'll have this presentation up on our website, as well, if anybody asks you for more information. So I'm good? OK. Can we? This isn't working. No, I can be there. Can you be the clicker? Yeah, I can be there. OK. Hi, everyone, and welcome. KVFC, partner at Drex Columns, with me is? I'm Cam Featherston-Hahn, Senior Associate Project Manager. So we're the, we co-lead the K-12 team. We do, you know, just a little bit of background about us. We do, we're a firm of 35 people in Burlington. And we have a studio, a group of us, who really focus on K-12, and are quite, but we also do other kinds of educational projects as well. Can you do the next slide, please? This is a book that we've written about school design called Digital Crayon. And if anybody would like a copy, just if you could give me a card or your name or an email that would send you a PDF copy. And I also want to introduce Kevin Warden, the Engineering Ventures. Kevin is part of our team. Hi. Yeah, Kevin Warden, Civil Engineer. Engineering Ventures, we're out of Burlington and have worked with David and Cam on many, many K-12 projects. Also the Waterbury State Office complex, pictured here after the renovation, pictured below after the July flooding. And happy to say it survived quite well with just a little bit of cleanup required. OK. So we're going to talk about the process for the master plan, what we've done so far, what we're going to do moving forward. Here are the main drivers. When the flooding happened here in Montpelier, as everybody can remember quite well, I'm sure. And the city did that excellent job with the community forums across the rest of the summer there. The schools kept coming up, and quite rightly so, but the schools kept coming up. This building, as most of you know, had about 2 million gallons of water in the basement. And it was about 8 inches away from where you're sitting now. So we had an 8 inch variance, which is a little close for our call, for Sanity's sake. So there's, of course, this question of, what about this building? It's sitting in a floodplain, even though it doesn't quite have the floodplain. Here, come on over. Even though it's kind of raised a little bit, that you'll see a map, I'm sure. The data's got this map in the presentation that this building is actually raised just slightly above the floodplain. And it's a little island in the middle of red. However, 8 inches is 8 inches. So what are we going to do with this building? What can we do to either mitigate and renovate to ensure that it's safe in the future for our students, so that learning isn't interrupted? Or are there other options for us? The board started asking these questions just like the city of Montpelier is asking those same questions. The city and the school district are two separate entities, so we need to do two separate processes around that. And then there's other questions as well. There's a picture of our hallway in Union Elementary School, which, if you're a parent of a Union Elementary child, you have had two extra days of child in your world because of water main breaks near that building, which has never happened in my tenure in six years. But it's happened twice so far this fall. It's an old building. It's a beautiful building. And it's an old building. So we're putting a lot of money into renovating some of those spaces and making it look quite beautiful. There's some pictures of that in the slideshow, as well as the auditorium and things like that. But there's some pieces. There's enrollment situations going on where enrollment at Union Elementary is dropping, not precipitously so, but it is dropping. And so that's a factor that is in play when we're thinking about our facilities usage. And then here, of course, is not our only aging facility. Main Street Middle School is also quite an old building. And again, a beautiful building, but quite an old building. And there's some pieces at Main Street that make it difficult to secure the building, to use the building appropriately for adolescents and all of those things that we want. So we're looking for these gentlemen to look at our buildings. What can we do with what we have? Are there possibilities for future that the board and the community may want to consider in the future without making any promises? And then there's also this idea of evolving pedagogy. That school is not the same as it was when all of us in this room went to it. These kids are in the gym now, so I could say that when all of us went to school, it's quite different now. And that's a question that we bring up here at Montpelier High School around, can we do more flexible learning opportunities within a structure of a school that's quite traditional, that's meant for kids to sit in desks? That may not be the type of education that we really want to provide for our kids moving forward, because it may not be the type of thinking we need them to do going forward. So all of these pieces are going into their work and their conversations with us in the community, and from there, building out a master plan for the future of something we can point to in the future when we're making decisions about our facilities and about important budget concerns and where we want to go with the education of our students. So there it is, an education that still brings me a nightmare when I see it. I have to take a second to look at it. So we just went through most of that piece, but that is a very telling picture with Montpelier High School right in the middle of that picture there, as I'm just going to pass by as well, so I'm not going to do that. It's too painful. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I can't start. It's OK. Go ahead. DPSD. So I just wanted to give you a little overview of the process. We're right here at this dashed line, so we're doing this workshop on setting the contacts. Feel like setting the table before we leave. What's the state of the state? And then we will have another, this other green is a visioning workshop, and that's really more of a blue sky visioning workshop where we'll talk about what are the goals for education, the educational experience here in this district. In the meantime, we're building our, in the blue here, we're kind of building our mouth base. We did tours of all the facilities. Andrews provided us with some great reports. And we're trying to, and then part of this process here today is to get more information to hear what the community has to say about what should be, we think we have a good idea of what the driver should be, but we want to hear from you as well about other things that we're not thinking of or haven't thought of or mentioned. So we're doing narratives on building condition, on space needs, and also on climate resilience. And then the yellow bar here will develop some options, big planning options, big picture stuff, 30,000 feet. And then we'll present that later in January at the third community workshop. Once we kind of, we get the feedback from that workshop, then we'll, we have a cost estimator on our team who will start to put, we'll do a pricing set, and they'll start to put some numbers to it to give people an idea of like, well, here's three options. Oftentimes we'll present those and say, well, it's hard to decide what's the best option until we know what's the relative cost between them. So we'll have that. And then at the end, you know, we'll put that together and that'll be the report and probably another presentation to the board and to the public about what, what the findings were. So that's kind of the lay of the land. And, you know, the goal is to have it wrapped up this spring. And as you were talking, I forgot to introduce my right-hand man with facilities, Andrew LaRosa. If you haven't, if you don't know Andrew LaRosa, he is wonderful and did a, I just need to say with pictures of the flood, he was masterful in handling this building during the flooding. So that's Andrew. When David referenced Andrew, I was like, oh, we haven't introduced him, which he hates, but that's all right, I have to embarrass him a little bit. I would add just one quick thing, you know, to take away from tonight is this is really the beginning of the conversation. And again, thanks for coming out. And now is the time to go back to the community and talk about what you heard here about the context and encourage people to come back and yourselves come back for the second one when we talk about vision. This is the time to have those community conversations find out what your neighbors think, talk to them. All right, and that's another way of saying, we don't have answers tonight, but we really look forward to all your questions. I guess the Hennie-Pennie slide, this is all of the, you know, kind of resiliency issues here. I don't profess to be an expert on all six of those, but it's something as a civil engineer that relates to the work we do. Obviously flooding is the elephant in the room. And as I mentioned with Waterbury State Campus, we have quite a bit of experience with that, a lot of these kind of natural disasters are random and they could happen anywhere. Flooding is pretty predictable. I mean, we don't know when we'll get the rains like we've gotten, but we know when we get them where it will flood, and that's because it's based on elevations, it's based on contours. I think we have some exhibits a little further on to get into the specifics of this site and the other sites related to flooding, so I won't go into a lot of it now. Hurricane earthquakes, we are in an earthquake zone that's centered around Montreal. We've probably all had that one or two experiences over our lifetime in Vermont where we're sitting in the couch and our feet are up on the coffee table and they start moving one way and whatever it is, but some kind of odd experience with seismic activity, that's happened. And then the other items relate to certainly location of school, facility, infrastructure you mentioned will be water lines breaking. So this is something obviously as you look at the schools you have and how to best keep providing educational and community services from those schools or consider alternative situations, we want to look at it through the lens of these items. I would offer the continuity of services you have as a parent that if COVID told me nothing else it was how important the continuity of services for schools are for our community. So that hopefully that doesn't get underplied. This is an image of the 100 year flood plain is the blue. That's Union Elementary in the middle there that U-shaped building. And the orange is the 500 year flood plain. Kevin, do you want to talk about the planning around the 100 year flood plain? You know, the towns are responsible, there's kind of the regulations and then there's just good planning and policy. And on the regulation side, towns and cities are responsible for implementing FEMA's requirements around flood mitigation and protection. And the reason for that is because the town has access to flood insurance and unless the town does implement it they can have, you know, be at risk of losing their flood insurance through the federal government. And so in order to implement it, you need to have a policy. Montpelier just updated theirs. It's a draft policy right now that's online. I think it was last week. The 7th. Yeah, and some of the things that were added we can talk about tonight. But the key takeaways are you have what's called the base flood or design flood elevation. And that's generally what's called the 100 year storm. And that doesn't mean it happens every 100 years but it has a one in 100% chance of happening every year. And it's based on data that's probably is outdated as we're getting different and more intense rain events. These maps were updated in 2013. These are the FEMA maps. So that's their 10 years old. It's just a, yeah. And so the blue is that 100 year and the federal government requires that buildings have their lowest floor one foot above that at a minimum. Montpelier, similar to Waterbury where we worked on the state campus requires two feet above that base flood elevation. I don't have the floor data on Union or Main Street. I do, I can talk more specifically here at this site. The red is that 500 year which means there's a 0.2% chance of it happening each year. And for facilities, one of the new changes in the Montpelier regulations for critical facilities and we should have a discussion around whether we think schools are critical facilities, obvious ones are police stations, fire stations, the Department of Public Safety and Waterbury right at their campus. Those are definitely critical facilities but I think the case could be made that a school could be considered a critical facility based on Montpelier's definition. For critical facilities, the floor level should be two feet above 500 year, that red, the lowest floor. I think the next slide shows Main Street and again the blue kind of nips at the edge of the site and then the red comes right onto the site and that's based on the elevations of the ground level. So the elevation of the parking lot but you might have a building which has a basement especially the historic buildings that are below those levels and while the regulations may say that building's not in the floodplain, there may be some things to consider because when we worked on Waterbury, some of the buildings that were above the floodplain elevation were impacted because water came through tunnels and utility pipes into the lower levels and that impacted buildings that would have otherwise not been impacted. Yeah. Do we need to explain the dwindling resources that's been on each of these slides? We're talking about warming climate. I think, for example, do we need to air condition the buildings, right? As an example, as part of making this building resilient from an educational standpoint, dwindling resources, use of energy really is what it's talking about is that, should all of the buildings be net zero or should we be, is that a driver? And then continuity of service is both the continuity of the operation of the schools because the flood happened in July, it took every minute up to when school started to get reopened. If it had happened on September 10th, school would have been out for two months. It would have been a loss of continuity. Also, my understanding, and Andrew, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but there's a lot of infrastructure services centered in this building that if this building went down, like data and phone, for example, the other schools would go down. So there's not resilience from that standpoint. So that word has double meaning. Yeah. It sounds like this might be outside of, like your brief for this, but in terms of like, one of the things that monthly doesn't have is like an area of refuge to go to, is that being considered as in the continuity of services? Well, it's a good question. Is this building considered now like a fallout shelter or a, what, this in June? Yeah. But although we use mainstream middle school during the flood. Right. Well, for obvious reasons, because you need a boat. Olivia, are we including Roxbury Elementary in the conversation? Yeah, we have one. Okay. These are just mostly environmental pieces. Sure. The next slide is Roxbury. And you can see the situation in Roxbury. I wanted to set you up. Yeah. Thank you. Didn't you? Yeah. The situation in Roxbury in terms of flood plains and that kind of thing is a different story. It's just a different area. I will say back to Main Street, one of the things to just think about as we're going through the study was, is that if the flood had influenced Main Street, there's an entire floor of school that is in the basement. So if this water were to get into Main Street, we wouldn't have had a basement to fill like we had here that we lost some books and some wood and some chairs. This would have been classrooms that we lost because that where the gym is and the sustainability lab and our room and our cafeteria, all of that is under grade. You can see here the gym, which is right here. You can see it, but I'll point it. It's in the 500 year flood plain. Yeah. Almost escaped. Can you go back to the Montpelier, because I think one thing that's a high school rather. So this is the 500 year here and this is the 100 year. And then the building is mostly in the 500 year, but there is a portion in the 100 year. So Montpelier, this... Kevin, you're gonna have to help me with the floor elevations. Yeah. The floor elevation of... 525. It's 525. The plus remains. And the 500 year flood is 525. So if this is a critical facility, critical facility, and you could look at the definition in the regulations and one of the only... The category that would mean is like if the building went down, there'd be a significant loss of socioeconomic activity as the category would fit under it. Then the floor level here is two feet two up. So what that means is that you have to flood proof the building, which means you make a bathtub out of the building. So that means you have to take the brick off and waterproof up the sides, put the brick back or something back, and then you have to put in floodgates at all the openings to keep the water out. So flood's coming, get the floodgates out, put them all up, more or less, right? And then there's other issues with hydrostatic pressure too, which... It's a big intervention. I mean, it suffices to say this is not like a simple, quick fix to make a building that was built in the 50s into a bathtub. Essentially. Yeah, we did... It was a different solution to water rate, but if you've been to the new target in Lebanon, that's four feet below the floodplain and we basically worked with FEMA to figure out how to do that there. And I want to say it was a million dollar effort to flood proof. I've got a question about how the flood water came in that I think is germane to the floodplain discussions. And endosaturation, depi-saturation, probably not everybody in the room is into that, but basically with these sandy soils, the water table is coming up. So I wonder, did the water make it through the basement in sort of an endosaturation sort of way or did the water come in where we got to a water level and it was maybe able to tip over and get into some access point? Basically, do we have a wet basement no matter how high that... Technically, we do not have a wet basement. It's actually pretty dry down there. Our best guess of where the water came from is we have a bulkhead down by the stage and make sure it reached there and there are about five large compartments down to separate the building. This is the only portion of the building that's slab on there. Otherwise, there's a six foot crawl space under the entire building. So the gym is an area, the stage is an area and there are about three foot wide openings, bulkheads that you go through. So I think definitely the bulkhead on the backside of the stage let water in. Also, it came through primarily penetrations that were in the building with water entrances, electrical entrances, things of that nature that it penetrated through. And certainly, my guess is way out of my realm, I think it did come from above because it's a dirt floor down below because when we got here on Tuesday morning, it was five and a half feet or so deep. By Wednesday morning, it had gone down. So I think it probably seeped back through. And then we started pumping. So I think it was a combination of a lot of little spots. Because somebody who owns a wet basement along the river, we didn't get flooded per se in our home, but we had water in our home. Yeah, and it is, like I say, it is typically dry down there. Yeah, okay, great, thank you. That's it. I mean, another approach is, you know, the convent at The Hall is approach where you have like barriers out, further out to protect it. Is this a site there? It's even amenable to something like that? We just had a perimeter. So I can say just briefly that- Did everybody have a question? FEMA, the question is basically creating levies around the perimeter of the building, whether they're verms or structures or whatnot. And FEMA would not allow that as a remedy. You don't, you're not required to store floodwater in your building on FEMA's behalf. You're welcome to keep that out of the building, but you can't take up area of the flood lane, which a levy would do to prevent flooding of that building. Cause what it does is it creates more issues downstream. So the short answer is no, maybe if you did a whole, tens of thousands of dollars of hydrologic studies to demonstrate that the levies wouldn't have impact downstream. And then a more nuanced answer is you can create a perimeter at the building, which is what we did at that target down in Lebanon. Yeah, yeah. You mentioned that these FEMA maps are 10 years old, but considered current. Is common expertise thinking that those levels are correct, that those elevations are correct when we look at the climate change version of a 100 year and 500 year? I mean, we know that we've had floods of this level and I know Irene was different than July 2023 here versus Waterbury versus, you know, wherever in Vermont, but we've had that twice in 10 years, 11 years. It's a little more nuanced than that, but we do know we're getting more intense longer duration rains, so they need, they will be continually updated. I think the elevations should be lower or higher than what we're seeing here. Should the map, or is it more about the frequency with which we connect? That's that question. More about the frequency and it's more about tolerance for risk tolerance, right? So that's what the required maps are. Your regulations refer to those elevations. Montpelier has said instead of one foot above the flood elevation, you need to be two feet above, so there's already some risk management built into those regulations. And then the real question will be what is the community wanna do? Does it wanna meet the bare minimum of the regulations or does it wanna go beyond? So it's little less about what should the maps be and how should the community respond to what the maps are and what we think is coming in the future. Sure. You talked about turning the building into a bathtub, but I think it's an anti-bath tub, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's a boat, yeah. You're gonna store all the water in the building. It's a bar, it's a bar, yeah. Interesting use of terms. How about an upside down butter dish? There was a question here first and then here. Is there any conversation that is informing this particular conversation about the dams upstream? I think that's a conversation that's bigger than us. Giving the conditions of the dams upstream? The conditions of the dam and the impact of those dams, not rights film necessarily, but perhaps Cadet, maybe further upstream in the potential impact on this building and the town. I know that the city and the state are, I mean, all of us are part of the stories of VR and that kind of thing, so I know the city and the state are working on that. That's a little bit beyond this particular study. I'm just, do you know anything about it? I don't know anymore. I was like, we've got an engineer in here. That would have been my answer. Yeah. Yeah, just a question. Well, it's sort of a slightly different version of that, which is that question about there's all of these other sort of climate resiliency discussions that are happening at the city level, and so it's more of a process question. To what extent, Truex Collins, will you be trying to align this plan with maybe some of those other plans that are going on? For example, if there is some fairly serious mitigation discussion happening, trying to orient myself, about essentially widening the bank of the river, like right here, what was that? Yeah, that would potentially have some pretty mitigating effects here that would probably totally impact the plan. So it's more of a process question and timing's probably not our front when it comes to this, I would imagine. Lydia, I can speak to that. I wanna emphasize that I'm not here in an official capacity. I am on the Resiliency Commission. It was recently stood up, and I can say, again, I'm speaking as James, I'm not here as a spokesman for the commission. I wanna be clear about that. But the commission is, from my perspective, there to handle the, and may I know, excuse me, the question was, Tom, next to you, who's Resil. To handle your, like the connecting pieces, right? That this, it's, as Libby said, there are entities that need to handle their own shop, but obviously they're all connected and the commission is taking that broader look. I hope that makes sense. Thanks, Jim. We have one more question for the manager. Oh, I'm talking home, go ahead. If we're a designated critical facility, does that open up other kinds of funding for us for renovation or repair or new construction? Detention, please. I don't know what that, I don't really answer that question. I don't know who deems you a critical facility or you self-declare it, but, what, what? That's declared. That's, but that's a great question because if you could get a designation and maybe there's more federal money related to flood proofing, that would be great. I want to view those great questions that we don't have answers for. Well, that's what this board is for, is, and I've been remiss in writing them down. Yeah, I appreciate it. Tom, did you have a question for him? Yeah, I said it, I had a quick question about the numbers. He said 525 feet is the elevation for a 500 year flood. No, that's the elevation of this floor above sea level. So this floor surface is 525.15 feet. Yes, which is the same level above sea level as the 500 year flood. Oh, right, right, right, right, my manager. No, I followed that part. What is the, just for the thoroughness of my notes, do you know what the 100 year? It's roughly 523.1 to 0.8, we're not in one spot, we're along a river that has a slope, so 523. And what didn't change? What was the flood we just had? Well, it was... Pretty close to that. We were eight to, can you go back to reaching central? So call that 524. So this is really cool. Can you go back to, so you see this map, this is 500, and right there is where the 100 starts. So go back, can you go back? Keep going back. Look at this. This is the 500 year flood destination on the map. Right there is where the 100 starts. And this is all in the 100 year flood plain. Just, you can see the water. Just the crown is showing. So it was really like a 100 year, it matched the 100 year flood map. What? I'd say a little higher. I mean, if the 100 year is roughly two feet below this floor and you were eight to 12 inches below this floor, then we were higher than the 100 year. What are the basics of the top step of the, the best we can gauge is about to the top step of the front entrance there. And you, if you look at this picture, is it the auditorium? It's the only closest. You can see the loading docks. I see just brick here. I don't see the concrete foundation below that. And I believe the floor goes below that brick. It slows down. If we go to that FEMA map, you'll see that auditorium is shown in the flood plain, which means this entire building is in the 100 year flood plain, even if a corner of it touches. And that's fairly accurate because that floor in there is below 5,000. But it did, it was dry? It sounds like it was. Yeah, which was it? There's a little water in the Union basement as well. There was water in the Union, but it was no more, it was just much bigger than what we would normally get after that rain. But there was people definitely kayaking down the school street. So the water, I don't know if anybody's familiar with premium floor work now. So the water came relative to Main Street. It went right to the Brown Valley. Yeah. That's where about it were tipped. And at Union, it went to, there's a corner of the church and what's that road that cuts across that? It's in St. Paul Street, yeah. It's on the street's Loomis. It goes to Loomis and then there's Loomis. Yeah, it got to St. Paul. It got to St. Paul, so it got to St. Paul Street. But no, I think the water that was in there was more just a matter of three weeks of just saturating the ground. Well, we thought there was a little water in there too, so. It's an odd thing, that school sits five feet above ground. There's always a little bit of watering. Maybe that pipe that personally was looking for a long time. One thing that, when I was saying we have to create a boat or a bathtub, is you also have to fill in the whole basement, right? You have to kick everything out of the basement. And make sure the boat doesn't float. Yeah, and you have to fill it in and including the boiler room, which is all down, even lower than this floor. So it's not as simple as removing all the bread in a lot of the bread. This is not simple at all. Yeah, sure, there's a question back there. Is there, in terms of, I think this is a way into the Waterbury campus, but in the overall plan, looking forward. The thing is, there's a planning that happens in terms of exterior facilities, based on the five-minute list of our parking lots. Flood resiliency. But they're gonna be designed in a way to withstand that. Pose them off, and you're good. Please correct me, but I know more about this now than I ever thought I could. But our baseball diamond out here, and our soccer pitch responded really well. It did what it was supposed to do. And it was back in action. Now, we've got some leads and stuff from the baseball diamond. Of course, you're gonna have that. But the soccer pitch, when I was out there mowing it two weeks after the flood, it really responded nicely to what? Because it's raced lately, right? The water just did, just poured off of it. Now, the softball diamond. Where am I? There. It's the softball diamond. So it's just part of the plan that gets set forth then, in terms of, like, yes, we know this is gonna flood, but it's a facility we can pose and go, kind of thing. I'm gonna jump in. I had a 30,000 foot level analysis. Absolutely. There's gonna be things we're talking about. Next year's baseball season, we're working on the field right now to look at whether we put clay back in the softball field, or do we use a baseball ball or a metal ball? So it's gonna be washed away. Because of the material, or was it the fact that we were at the pinch points and the water was moving faster? We're not gonna be sure. On a very immediate level, we're definitely talking to FEMA about those. Do we go back? Oh, I mean, sort of that longer term. I can give you a specific illustration from the water, Barry, if we wanna flip to that aerial view in the beginning. And specifically, there were 22 buildings between that brick, long row of buildings, historic building section, and the river. And someone asked about the dams. Those dams were put up after the Great Flood in 27. And either because of hubris or institutional memory loss, they built 22 buildings out towards the river, which were all badly damaged during that year. So this process involved evaluating a lot of different things, but the end result was take the buildings out and put one building in that building was in an area where we actually had to fill. I remember I said, you couldn't fill to remove the capacity of the land to store water. The white building is on fill, which means we had to lower everything around. So those parking lots are designed to flood. You can see it there. I can see it there. And what I understand from the facility staff is it was a couple of hours of cleaning up after and they were ready to go. But more importantly, there's fields out beyond those. And all of this impervious needed to have stormwater treatment to meet the regulations. And the stormwater division, and many folks were really pushing hard for new innovative technologies, many of which include filtration and other systems. And we kind of held our ground and said we're gonna use something different than that. We're not gonna use filtration systems knowing that they would flood. So we just have very basic grass swales, which still function. And they have a lot of length in grass swales out through those fields. But again, they were ready to go after July. We will be looking at that in general. So should we maybe move on to, and we can do more questions at the end. Next thing we wanna just kind of give a brief overview of the facilities. Andrew? Yeah, I'll make this very quick. Just so folks who haven't been in the buildings or haven't been in all the buildings. The Roxbury Village School is a wood structure. It's been added onto the original two buildings. It's a one-room schoolhouse. And what we refer to as the town hall classrooms that were added back in the 80s and the 90s. It's about 10,000 square feet. It's generally in very good condition. It's a wood structure. So it definitely needs continual maintenance. On the exterior for sure, as well as the interior. But it has been maintained over the years. Probably the biggest changes that have happened in the last five years is the DDC control system on the mechanical systems has all been. It used to be, we'd find out whether things were working or not, depending on if we got a phone call from Tina when she showed up to work. But now Tom actually can look at the systems at four o'clock in the morning when he has his cup of coffee. And make sure everything is working properly. So that's a huge addition of that. Or improvement that's happened down there. The other thing that has been a big improvement down there is the heat pumps that we put in all the classrooms and administrative offices. That project is complete and they're operating well. And we actually kept that a relatively simple. We did not add those to the DDC. We just let them run. And then whether they can't keep up the DDC and the rest of the mechanical systems kick in and that seems to work really well. DDC for us. Direct digital control. Thank you. Oh, you've done all those too? Yeah. I'm thinking of the last year. So electrical, this goes for all of our buildings. All of our buildings are net meter. All of the electrical that we use in our district is being generated offsite somewhere. So that's consistent for all of our buildings. Number two oil is what we keep building with. Site-wise, it gets damp in the spring but actually dries out pretty well. Surprising because it really is about as low as you get in Roxbury. But that's the Roxbury Village School. They say about 10,000 square feet. Really? State-wide assessment that was just done. Call out some accessibility needs at the school if that would need to be. Yeah, the public uses that building. Since COVID, it's not as often as they used to but it's a hub and it's used for town meeting day and things of that nature. So for accessibility, it's a dirt parking lot because there's a sidewalk to the front door and then you come in but you can't just close the town hall and open it up to the public for accessibility. You actually have to allow folks to go through the entire building. I would just add from our perspective, it's a very quaint, old school, literally, small village school. It's kind of cool because it's a town hall and I think the original school house with a little wing that connects them. So very much the small village school model. There's 35 up there now. There's a picture of our auditorium. Everybody who went on were that. It's gonna be gorgeous. So that's Union Elementary. That was built in 1939 as an elementary school. Big picture, site-wise, we all know about the playground renovation in stormwater mitigation that took part as part of that. So it was very cool, interesting things that were took place for that but we're gonna go back over that. New roof was put on about 10 years ago so that's in great condition. The building itself is very well made. Chorazo floors, glazed block on the walls. We at this point, for environmental concerns, the only real asbestos that's left in the building are the ceilings in the hallway but otherwise we just took out about $100,000 worth of asbestos out of this room and a little gym this summer. So whenever we do a project, we take it out. Again, this building is heated off of district heat. So we do have boiler, the original, not the original, but we have older boilers that handle the shoulder season but district heat has been perfectly reliable for that building. Tara, who's the head custodian of the building, has done an amazing job. She is on top of it and she is crawling through every nook and cranny of that building and getting to know it really well. Yeah, this building's about 50,000 square feet, a basement that is, is a little, there's water that runs through it, we've got some pumps and things of that nature. But fundamentally, the bones are very strong and they're very good in this building. The windows have always been in concern. We need to do that project but the price of those windows are very, very expensive and it's a matter of coordination and COVID kind of throws for a little bit but we're not going to use that since it's much longer, so. Some of, yeah, I could time in. Some of the things, all of the schools, the three-mile failure schools is that, when we look at schools, one of the things we look at is safety and security and all of the administration areas where the offices are remote from the entry and common practice now is to have, be able to credential people as they're coming in the building, in the airlock and then buzz them in. This building is one of these things where there's a lot of signage and the people are very diligent about making sure they intercept anybody who comes in the building, but so that's a concern. When we talked with the principal, she said there's really no space for community events because the seating, whereas the auditorium is beautiful, it's not a lot of seats, the gym is very small, it's very undersized. So that was a comment of hers. Another comment was just a lack of flexibility. It's got great bones in terms of high ceilings, wide corridors, nice materials, but it's not very flexible building. There's not a lot of, you know, operable partitions or different ways it can be used or reconfigured. So those are just some comments about some of the things we've seen so far on our tour. That's what I'm trying to really quickly say. I think that's an absolute gem. And what an incredible asset for the community. It's a beautiful building, very well designed, but very much a product of its time. When you go in the basement and you see the incredibly large coal hoppers and the giant chute, it's kind of like, it makes you realize, yeah, this building was built 80 years ago for a different society, the different expectations of their students. One of the things about, when we talked about earthquakes, I know everybody's focused on flooding, but Vermont and we haven't looked at each site. So there's general seismic activity in a region and then you specifically look at a site to see what kind of soils there are and which can indicate even further because when the ground starts to shake, if you're on jelly, you're gonna shake even more. So none of these buildings, as far as we know, have been upgraded for seismic. And so we just felt like, we know flooding is the top of mind, but in terms of doing our due diligence, we really gotta cover all the bases and make sure we don't floodproof the buildings and then there's an earthquake and we didn't do our job, so. So another, he says, for the Union Elementary, it is not sprinkled, it's being a continuity of operation. That building's not sprinkled. Main Street is partial. The, this building was built in 1917. The site we've gone through and improved the basketball court and things of that nature. The next piece will be the playground, which is part of ESSER funding. We'll see what comes of that. There's improvements that we need to make. It's, and we're gonna, unfortunately, that playground piece is gonna be the buffer with inflation. We've got other ESSER projects that we've, Libby's talked about over the years. That's sort of our course. I don't wanna say more important, but they're sooner in the queue, so. But we'll definitely be making some improvements there that next summer. The roof on this building, again, is about, the original portion of the building is, again, about 10 years old in great condition. On the 80s edition, which is the basketball court and the music room, that wing. That is original to the construction in 82. It's a built-up roof. Still is working well, but it's gotta be, we gotta put that on our radar because built-up roofs are long-lasting, but 40 years is still 40 years. Windows, same concern. Those are the original windows. They're gigantic, they're beautiful, they still operate, but they're leaky and breezy. Even more important, because we have relatively new boilers that can keep up with the heat. It's more of the summertime. It's the sun coming through those, that getting some glass in there that can reflect some of that, that light or the intensity of the sun would make a huge difference with regards to comfort in the next four months. That's right. Yeah, it's not poor, and I know they get it. And we just, I mean, as part of the study, looking at climate resiliency, according to some sources, we just had the hottest of July in 100,000 years. So, it's a point well taken. Those rooms. And those hot days are in May. Yeah. But late Mays when we have those super hot days. Yeah. So it's actually eating its way into the school year. Yeah. Those rooms definitely are that, like I can see it happening, but it's not just that morning. Brick construction, masonry structure, infills in the walls, very sound building. Again, one of the biggest challenges is the basement, which when it was originally designed was a very low gymnasium. And the cafeteria and kitchen are now classrooms and cafeterias. And I actually have at least the amount of information on the original building of any of those for this one, which is unfortunate because it used to be an auditorium and a balcony in that building. Well provided. It used to be a high school, right? It was originally built as a high school. A high school, yeah. HBC, some relatively new boilers. Again, that was done 10 years or so ago. Again, all the mechanical systems, air handling, when COVID came through, we were able to do an amazing job. There was an audible whoosh in these buildings that I had never heard of when my son was in that building. So people can, with Tara and Mickey in this building, again, an amazing job. They are on top of things in the mechanical systems in these buildings. So when we toured this building, some of the things we heard from the principal and from the notes on my phone here. The library is undersized. So this building has a lot of spaces you'd expect in a school like an art room, a music room, a library, but they're all very undersized given the population and the use. There's no performing arts capability in the building. So there's no auditorium. There's no stage. And really the only gathering space is the gym, as far as I, we know. You know, the cafeteria, the kitchen was cited as being particularly problematic in terms of size when we were walking through and cafeteria as well. And of course, the site is very small. It's an urban site, so there's no soccer pitch or baseball field or anything like that. We all know that. But, and parking, of course, is very limited as well. It's worth noting that the school built in 1917, Woodrow Wilson was the president. You could buy a new Model T for, this was built as a high school that perhaps is the least adapted to the kind of educational offerings that are being offered in middle schools because it's all corridor and classroom, you know? And these were in 1917, the kids that were going to high school were high performers and it wasn't every kid going to high school in 1917. And kids sat in rows and they learned and we don't do that in middle school anymore. Teams teach as a group and the education's very different. So this is kind of the most, kind of pushing the square through the red hole. Yeah, the concept for middle school is team teaching. It's considered a transitional, educational experience between being in a solitary classroom and then being in a departmental high school. And so we'll show some slides later, but they are teaching in teams and they're making do with the space they have, but there's no common area, let's say to get a team together for morning meeting or for any kind of activities. In fact, there's no, it's just, they're basically using the classroom. So it's not ideal. I mean, has it probably been like this for a long time? Is it working? Are the kids getting an effective education? Probably yes, or definitely yes, but is the building suited for the model of education that's being delivered? Probably not. I think it's this hinges on the sensitivity to kind of social and emotional learning as a component of 21st century education, where it's not just math and reading, writing, you know, and the school that's all quarters of classrooms has no space for that social and emotional learning. So, and this is at a critical age for kids as they're blossoming, going through puberty, their networks are expanding, they're kind of moving out of that one classroom, my friends are in my class age into the bigger world. So that's not to dwell on too much, but that's... What about accessibility in this building? Accessible through the gym entrance. So there's... And so for kids like in the, is there an elevator? Yes. There is, okay. I just never found it. Now it's right inside that when you go in the gym entrance, that's another one that in the facilities report that definitely know that that is from 1982 or so, and parts, it's definitely one of those pieces that when it breaks, we're buying parts on eBay. But your kids safe, I promise. They're in the elevator, I promise. I love this building is beautiful, but it feels like it's a worn a little bit, like a little bit of a hamster. Oh yeah, definitely. Yeah, and my daughter can navigate her way through it, but I've often thought about... Like kids with accessibility issues, and if the building itself is daunting to them a little bit to get around. It's a pre-war school, I mean it was like, yeah, it was just a world war one. Yeah. So the high school, high school, we'll go to the site considerations after we talk about it, but we'll go to the rest of the building. This was built in the early 50s. This addition was added in the 90s, the library and then the four science classrooms above us. Brick and steel, this building is sprinkled. Again, double-loaded corridors, classrooms and hallways. Windows were replaced, I believe it was the 90s when they got rid of the ribbon windows, but it might have been earlier with someone with a little more institutional knowledge. Early 2000s. Early, okay, yeah, so. So they got rid of this, used to have these long, beautiful ribbon windows, well, beautiful to go modernist, but beautiful windows that were taken out and put in, luckily, fortunately, good quality aluminum windows. So, heated with a number two oil, all the three buildings in town have 10,000 gallon tanks, double-walled monitor out in the site. There is the only air conditioning in this building is in the administrative spaces, a little bit in the administrative spaces, otherwise, it's on the interior space but no air conditioning, so it's tough to describe something you're seeing on the screen. You're seeing it, but. One of the things that all the buildings have benefited from has been, before my time, a consistent, always adding a little something, always trying to do it every year, we try to do a few classrooms in every building, and it's keeping it ahead of things, and we see the results here in this building and all the buildings, really. The site is probably one of the most challenging pieces that Matt Link could probably speak to. The next, there you go. It's in our athletic fields, in that we try to keep people off the game field, which is in there in the track, so we can have it ready for games, having a good book, we can show it for games. So, we've got the front practice field, we've got the old mud lot that actually is turning into a better field than we ever would have hoped. We were hoping just to get it green, but again, every year we aerate it more and add a little more soil and a little more ventilation, and it gets a little better every year. But our practice fields are not fabulous, but they're there, but we also have to accommodate the middle school teams, and especially with the loss of the dog river. Matt has done a good job of being able to accommodate and move things, and we've worked with, this year we worked with a new reverse soccer at the college to get some teams playing up there. Next year's going to be a real challenge in that we want the mud lot field and the practice field, the two out front, to bounce back from the floods, which means staying off them for a year. So, that's going to be, Matt's going to, Matt, like the athletic director, is going to have to do some juggling, because obviously the dog herd fields are not going to be back in shape next year to be used. We use the outfield or the baseball field for field hockey, which hasn't slowed them down at all. So, and then parking is definitely an issue. This is probably the, it's just going to get worse and worse as people get through their fall driver's ed courses and start getting their licenses. So by the springtime it's pretty tight with your first parking, so. I'll just add to that site layout wise. I worked with Andrew when we were working on the track and looking at alternatives. And, you know, if you, Rocksbury, Main Street, Union School, all are nicely agnol with the streets and I see this trend all over, something happened in the fifties or sixties. We're going to put our school like at 42 degrees to the main road and we're going to use up all the space and you can see just, even though the school's done a great job of putting, you know, overlapping fields, it's the location of the site is challenging. And it might have been interesting in that we owned more land back then too. So, but those are the texts. Just as a point of context, the middle school's about 50,000 square feet, this building's about 100,000. So Union and Main Street are about 50, just about 100,000 square feet. So the roof here, one last piece. The roof here is, this is another piece that I noted in the facilities report and that we're going to have to keep moving further up the packing orders. That roof is probably about 30 years old. We put a silicone coating on it several years ago when we had the bond vote. The intent was to replace it, but the money did not work out. It was not enough money to do that. So what we did was a silicone coating that's actually worked pretty well. But at some point that original membranes is going to get too brittle that it's going to start to get bald. But it's working still, so it's something we just need to keep on the radar. Two things I wanted to mention was one with sprinklers. This building's sprinkler, Main Street is not. What about Union? Union is limited. So the codes are much heavily lean towards sprinkling your building town and schools. And a lot of times when we work on an old school, the code officials like your grandfather now, but the second you add like a 10 square feet to the building, we're going to make you sprinkler the whole thing. We have one project where they're like, the next time you do a project in the building, we're going to make you sprinkler the whole building. But, and it's expensive and it's invasive, but you also could, you know, when we talk about continuity and resilience, you could look at it from a protection of assets. You know, in fact, well, in some countries it's the insurance companies that require sprinkling, not the code officials, because they look at it as, you know, from an insurance standpoint. So that's just, I just wanted to say that about sprinkling. Does that, a lot of times people are like, oh, I hope they don't make us do it. But if you look at it from a resilience standpoint, it really protected, you know, the schools are probably among, if not the greatest of the community's assets from a replacement value standpoint. And so, you know, is it, is that, protecting that asset could be a common priority. The other thing I wanted to mention was, in terms of air conditioning and, you know, the warming climate that we live in, the analogy that somebody used to me was, they said, you know how turf fields extend our sports seasons? They said, air conditioning extends our learning season, because on both in September and in May, we get more learning days and because kids aren't baking in the 90 degree heat in the room. So I thought that was a great analogy. In terms of the high school, you know, the district offices are in this building and that, I know there's been a, for a number of years there's been an investigation about whether they should move out and because it creates a space shortage within the building. There's one conference room for the entire building. There's no small group workspace and an example is, you know, we were talking on our tour about the idea of creating a ninth grade team. You know, that's a, some high schools have continued the team model to ninth grade as a transition, but there's no team space here. Like you would just have to basically take a corridor and say, okay, you four classrooms, you're a team. So it's similar discussion as when we talked about teaming in middle school. I'm in jail. Just a constraint, so we're, you know, thinking about possibilities of dreaming for the next meeting. Parking is obviously a concern. I look at that lot that the state owns there. Presumably it's wholly owned by the state. Would it be part of this whole process to maybe enter in discussions with them about if we create a parking gates, parking there, but also like if we needed some more room and if they don't have as many people using that lot because of teleworking to expand our borders a little bit. Just don't know if that's a possibility or if it's just a hard line and we're constrained by that space. Well, Jason, you spoke with them directly, correct? We're allowed to use that space, so it's probably a lot. Okay, so we tell students all the time that there's no spots there. They could park there, they won't get ticketed and in the non-winter snow months, they could walk diagonally across. So at least from a parking stand point? From a parking stand point. Not from a being on time to class stand point. Sure. Not quite, but from a parking stand point. Or not from adding more fields or expanding the track stand point, right? Thanks. So I'm wondering if we can speak to, we were talking about changing pedagogy needs. One of the things that I hear a lot from schools and I'm wondering if you can speak to it in these schools is those need for one-on-one spaces with students, either for mental health support, students on IEPs. It feels to me like our buildings are not flexible in that way because they're so traditional. And I'm just wondering if you can speak to it. Yeah, we have way more streets at Union. It's not quite as concerning as Union. It is at Roxbury and it is at Main Street and in this building and that's actually one of the reasons, main reasons actually we would love, although with this budget situation we're in now, it probably isn't gonna be a reality anytime soon to get district offices out of here because our small offices, while it takes up space, they are small offices. And teachers could use them. It's a real challenge here when you get to a certain age, you don't wanna be seen one-on-one with your teacher or with your teacher helping out necessarily in a way that a youngster might not think of that. And so the privacy needs of kids here in this building in particular and at Main Street are huge. That's a major thing that we would add if we could. If we ruled the world and didn't have to deal with budget constraints. Jason, do you wanna add anything to that? Jason's our high school principal if anybody doesn't know. No, I think that was great. I would offer from a broader trend, we work with school districts all over the state. And one of the things that we have found, and this really confounds people, because we'll come in and we'll say, we'll do a space needs analysis and we'll look at a school and we'll look and we'll say based on the space needs of the programs that you're running today, today is not like building new programs, what you have today. Your building should be about 10 to 20% bigger. And people say, how can that be? We have fewer kids than we had 20 years ago. That makes no sense to me. But it's because 20 years ago when these buildings were renovated and added on to, we didn't have speech, language and pathologists in the school. We didn't have occupational therapy and physical therapy. We didn't have behavioral interventionists. We didn't have math and literacy coaches. There are a host of support services that schools provide for the communities that are new since these physical plans were built in 1917, 1938 when they were expanding in the 60s and in the 90s. And we have a lot of adults providing services that are in a much more space intensive way. To say nothing of just the changes and pedagogy around kids don't all sit in the neat rows anymore. You have hands-on learning. You have small group instruction. You have private places where kids who have sensory issues can get away. So it's a different approach. It's a different set of needs than what we built for in the past. Correct me. Montpelier High is the only one who hasn't been tested for PCVC yet, right? Roxbury is the spring exam and I think we're next to summer here. But Union and Main Street were cleared and we're not to next summer. Okay, so we've talked a bit about evolving pedagogy and I'm just looking at the clock and I wanna make sure everybody has a chance to pontificate and ask whatever questions you'd like to ask. But I would be remiss to not be able to put a plug jumping on what Cam just said around our four pillars of theory of improvement here in the district, which are collaborative practices and collective of our teachers. Meaning our teachers are not by themselves anymore. Tom was a wonderful biology teacher. He's working with Katie Chabot on a regular basis and our union elementary grade level teams are working together collaboratively every single day because teaching kids is hard and we can't do it by ourselves. That lone person is no longer the model. So we're collaborating all the time. Another piece is high quality instruction for every single classroom is most definitely obviously our priority and what does that look like now? We want kids up, moving, talking and do we have the spaces we need to do that? Our third is a timely system to intervene, remediate and enrich, which goes along again with what Cam was saying. That's a whole host of educators when we're speaking of that, of interventionists and remediationists that we've added so much in my six years as a superintendent to that area because we needed it. We were very low in that one when we started here six years ago. So we've, I don't know the exact size, I think we've quadrupled our intervention team since the beginning and each year in the summer I walk with the principals and we go through saying where are we going to put them? Right Jason? Andrew's moved four times, his offices moved four times in the last four years and he's going to have to move again because we have to move an electrical panel up to the room that he currently is in now. So with all of these good things, come people who are doing services for kids. And then the last one is a guaranteed and viable curriculum of course and what does that look like? How do we have the pedagogy to do that? There's some challenges to our facilities in order to get those happening. We're making it happen. I don't want to paint a picture of bloom and gloom and gloom, sorry. We're making that happen. And there's still some needs that we could, if we were dreaming pie in the sky we would have some changes there of course. I do have a PowerPoint. So what does the future look like? Way back before COVID, we started a Main Street Middle School Building Committee with our school board. Some of you, I don't think anybody was on it tonight and you weren't on it. But Andrew and I were on that and one of the sessions I did, what does the future look like for education? And I kind of pulled that up today just to say, is there anything in here that I want to reiterate? And I'm not going to go through the whole slideshow. And I don't even know if I can click it because of the sharing settings right now, but it is in this slideshow and I'll put this up on our website if everybody wants to put it, but look at it. But it is really interesting to see pictures of what a plumber might have done in 1917 when Main Street Middle School versus what a plumber needs to do now. And there's some dichotomies there. The fact that information used to double every 18 years, then five years, and now it's 18 months information doubles. So what kind of education do we need to provide for students to be able to flourish in the world that they're going to be moving into? That PowerPoint addresses that or makes us think in that way. So when we're dreaming big for the future, maybe that's a good one to kick us off with next time to start off our visioning, but I don't want to take the time to do it now. That's a perfect segue. And this is a teaser here about, this is a teaser here about visioning workshops. So our approach is whole child design. We believe that just like schools are trying to address the needs of the whole child, so should school design. And we've broken that into three categories, wellness, learning, engagement, which it's kind of mind, body, spirit. Not quite in that order, but. And you'll see that in one of the things that Camel alluded to earlier is that most of these schools were designed for mind and body, but not social, emotional learning and growth. So we're gonna show a couple of pictures with some projects just to kind of highlight what we mean by that. You go to the next slide. So this is Waduski Project. So these are not like magazine pictures. This is Waduski Project. Catering to wellness. You know, not just like get in the building, get your credential, get to class. This is a full school-based health clinic. There's a doctor's office. There's a dental office. There's a traditional sick bay. There's two nurses. There's a waiting area. It's like going into a doctor's office. And they felt that in their community, kids weren't ready to learn. They were coming with two things, medical issues because of the language barrier because there's a lot of refugees. They were really struggling to access healthcare. And so the school said, we will provide healthcare because readiness to learn is so important. There's a cafe in the lobby. So kids can come in and not just kids, but staff, parents, community, it welcomes them in. And then this is a necessity store. They have a pantry, a food pantry, and they have around, you can see the coolers, and then around the corner is clothes. So like boots, gloves, all kinds of winter gear this time of year. I don't know about the summer. So the idea was that there was an equity piece here that kids who needed this shouldn't feel stigmatized and have to go into the back closet and say, excuse me, can I have, I don't have a jacket, provide more of a retail environment for those kids. And another piece is they have a huge number of languages. So we really were challenged by how do we provide a way for everybody to find a way around. So we did a whole exercise with the students about what kind of iconography would help them understand what these things were. And it was really funny because for the cafeteria, we showed a plate and a fork and a knife and the kids were like, no, a ball with chopsticks. It was more appropriate. And that's what it ended up being. Next slide. So this is, we talked earlier about team-based learning and what kind of spaces support that. And this is the middle school common area in their team. So we've got classrooms around. We have, we pop the roof up. This is a new addition to get natural light into the center of the space. And then this is the science room and the science and the light can go all the way into the science room, even though it's a very space. Because one of the things we're gonna do with the visioning workshop is we're gonna work to develop what we call guiding principles. And we do this on all of our planning projects. And these are the, what are the important things we gotta get right in terms of school planning for this district? What are your values? What do you value most? Is it sustainability? Is it natural light? Is it fresh air ventilation? Is it team-based learning? And we'll use the whole child framework to develop those guiding principles or at least we'll develop the groundwork for those guiding principles. One of the things in this project, they were, natural light was so important because they had had a school with so many buried spaces. And so it was a real driver of all planning and design was to make sure of that. Because it's a wellness issue. It's also a learning issue. There are studies that show that kids learn more effective learning spaces when they have access to natural light. The next one. Engagement, collaborative social learning spaces, community spaces. This was their existing 1950, what was it, Ken? 1957. 57. Very similar to this one. Very similar to this. We took out four classrooms. We created this really engaging social hub. But it's not just a social hub because learning happens everywhere now, right? I mean, you're not confined to your desk, listening to a teacher, you're on your computer, you're talking with your colleagues. Up above, there's small seminar rooms that are all glossed in. So if you do the group work, you can do that in a non-disruptive way. So the Virginia workshop is gonna be a very blue sky opportunity to think big and think about what's really important for Montpelier schools, Montpelier-Moxbury schools. Next slide. This is a project, this is at Mount A, renovation. And the original driver was security. So as I was saying earlier, here, the admin and the credentialing area is remote from the entry. Here, we created the second floor area, built this vestibule underneath and you can see the transaction window here. So creating, and that's the real slight of hand with design is how do you create a secure yet welcoming entry, right? Because you don't want it to look like a prison. You want it to feel like, and so. But they also, here, we call this the units bar. This is a table that has, where kids can plug in and charge. They serve refreshments and stuff here. And then they have this big video display where they have different events all day long and places to sit. And up here, these are the mountains, the mountains, the rings of the mountains. Mount Abraham, the mountain is in. Next slide. This is another view of the lobby. So the idea here is just welcome community space. This is the living room. This is how, I always say, when you come into the lobby of a school, it should tell you everything you need to know about that school, its values. Some schools, when we walked into this originally, all there was was sports trophies. I said, if I didn't know better, I would say all you really care about is sports. And they went, no, that's not true. That's not true. I said, well, let's think about what should this lobby say? Because buildings speak. Some buildings you look at and they say, come on in. You're welcome. This is a place of learning. Other buildings look like fortresses. And so that's a question we always ask is, what do you want your buildings to say to the people who work here, to the people who visit here? So, and then finally, this was an East Montpelier. This was the library. This was the reading note, the read aloud area. Bathe in natural light, use the exterior. Fun colors, very kid-friendly. So all these things, this one was sort of the summary slide of wellness, learning, engagement, all coming together to create spaces that support the needs of the whole child. So we're gonna talk more about that at the visioning workshop, but I think it's worth thinking about between now and then. I hope you come back while looking at these images, thinking about these ideas. What are the opportunities here in this district? None of those are new-builds, that's right. Some of them are addition, there's some additions, but it was renovations to existing buildings. Yeah, they're all local schools too. These are the mall communities that are doing this kind of work. Sure. I have two questions. One is, are you going to be, or have you already talked with the teachers themselves about what they currently need to make things work and what their blue sky ideas are, or would the next one of these be the place for teachers to show up and share their ideas? Great question. So what we like to do is have a cross-section of the community, so administration, teachers, students, if we can get parents, community members. And what we do is we have tables, we'll probably do it here, and have tables like this, and we make sure that every table is a mixture, a cross-section, so you don't have all the voices of one group talking one way. And so it's a really engaging conversation at each table as we work through this. So that's one way we can get teachers input. But this is a very high-level master plan, so there's a limit to how deep we can drill into, we can't talk to every teacher or teachers in every school. We have did the tours with the building principles, and we'll get more information as time goes on, but hopefully we get some teachers here for the vision. Yeah, it seems important to me for us to hear from the math that people work in the classroom after some of the day. Absolutely. My second question is, those most recent slides you showed us were stunning. Absolutely stunning. And I'm also thinking about what's the must-do's and what's the nice-to-do's, because we won't, I can't imagine that we would be able to afford all of the nice-to-do's. Is there a way that we would be able to have it, I don't know, tiered or prioritized in some way? Well, this master plan is gonna be, like I said, very big picture, so we're gonna have big planning ideas, like build a new high school on this site, right? Renovate this high school and, you know. Make it a mark. Make it a bathtub, make it a mark, right. Build a new school on another site, or it's like big block planning, like idea planning. So we won't be getting into, do you take down, we're not gonna, to that level, design a level of colors, or can we afford skylights, or not skylights, so. But within that context of this study, you know, I encourage people to think freely about it, because this is the time to let you, you know, we always say, you know, our approach is, head in the clouds, feet on the ground, right? You wanna think big, but you wanna be grounded also in terms of what's possible. I think there's a question about here. One quick comment, I think it's a lot to ask our teachers to come to an evening session like this, and so I hope that there'll be another vehicle to gather that feedback, so I think it's really important to me. And my other question is, I mean, I think that we probably would not be here doing this had it not been for the flood. So you had mentioned the state complex and a target in New Hampshire. I'm curious about other flood mitigation projects that Chowick's Colons may have done, and if there are not school flood mitigation projects that you have done, do you know of other schools that have done projects like that? So we don't have done any flood mitigation projects, which is why we brought engineering ventures on who's done a few. Chowick's Colons did not do the state complex. No, we did not do the state complex. I was a different architect that engineering ventures were working for. So we're learning also, but we have our resident expert, so how architects, we know enough to be dangerous about some things, and then we bring in our experts for the rest. And every group that replied to our RFP, that was how it worked. There's an architecture firm and there's an engineering firm that partner in the conversation. Do you mind if I ask if you're the engineering, how does that go? Have you worked on other flood mitigation projects for schools? We've worked on other flood mitigation projects. One that comes to mind is the Burnham Hall in Lincoln that flooded during the 90s and came up with the solution and during Irene, the water was up above their lower level and they had the flood gates in and some infrastructure inside and it all worked great. And it's now on like a female website and it says, here's how to do it. We worked at a school, it wasn't a school, it was a publisher's office in distribution of schools, school publications in I think the Littleton, New Hampshire. I can't think of a school that we've worked on. Trying to think of schools that are in the floodplain in Vermont, I feel like you're in the middle of a peculiar. I mean, our schools came through the flood statewide, really, even in our really heavily impacted communities. And the high school is the exception, even though it, you know. We were the most animal-mortarant here. Yeah, I haven't really had any calls from another school district since July. Schools have been built up high and outside of the downtowns. Well, it's really interesting because we've done many master plans. This is the first one where environmental resilience has been in the RFP like, we want you to look at this. So, and I think there's gonna be more and more of these quite honestly, you know. Because whether it's floods or earthquakes or, you know, global warming. Keeping these buildings operating and effective as place for learning is going to be a challenge. Sure. So when you started off to talk, you were kind of, you know, cautioned about the cost of some things, like the cost of making a bath up and you know, the hydrological sense. Just in perspective, how expensive was the remediation to the school after flood? Like, where's your, like? What's our number right now? Andrew? Drum roll. So, very good insurance. As you said. It's not the other insurance, right? Zero. Zero is what I wanted to know. Visbit did a great job. While Visbit, while I was over at the middle of the, and we got coffee and donuts over at the middle school, Visbit was already on the phone saying, we got people in high school. I'm like, we're fine, I looked at the cameras, we're fine. He said, no, you're not. As just, what the last, I heard, for pumping and drying the basement and pumping, what they did to get the water out of the building is they pumped water out, they then pumped hot air into the basement, drew it out at the two far ends, and then they pumped air conditioning into this, they positively pressured this floor into the other floor of the air conditioning. For seven weeks? That was million to a million and a half dollars for that piece, just that piece alone. So it seems like it's a pretty cheap insurance to, just in terms of like all the efforts for, you know, moving forward with the resilience plan, even if this turning this into a bad thing, it came for itself within the first, maybe flight again. And then, just as a follow up to that, then on the exterior of the building, so far we're at about, we're about 200,000 FEMA is going to pick up all of it, 12 and a half percent of that. And then anything we build back better, according to FEMA, they will just match what we spent on the disaster, as I understand it, they'll match us up to about 1.2 million, but we have to pick up 12 and a half percent of what that is we decide to do. And we have talked a little bit about what some of those measures are gonna be. Tom Allen's got somebody, Tom and I and Kevin had talked a little bit about it, about making the void. Basically, there's nothing under the school other than the void, like we make that the Alamo, like we spend a lot of money on that. And if the rest of the dirt gets wet next time, the dirt gets wet. But we're still working through that, we've got some time, and like I said, already talked to Kevin about doing that walkthrough to really flesh out some of those ideas. I'm very curious about this question about FEMA homeowner, they came once, what about this location at school? That is a very good question. Isn't the city running into that in the Dog River? I don't know. I don't know that either. We haven't gotten to those conversations of what happens the next time. I don't know. Did she go on the board yet? Yeah. I don't want to speak to her because I don't know. We haven't gotten to that. Andrew, I'm just curious about all the other buildings and structures, like the greenhouse and other spaces. How did they do? They survived well. They survived well. The water went through the greenhouses. Tom, the water never touched the main greenhouse. That was an island. Yeah, the building, the chickens in the greenhouse, they drive. The hoop house does a current through there, and the gardens are flooded. Yeah. The main greenhouse was an island, it was high enough. I think it's an interesting question. The cost of mitigating this past flood, what was it? What's the kind of, what are you working against, right? What's that cost to clean up? But it's kind of a crapshoot, right? Because when we get seven to nine inches in the communities around here of rain, what happens if it's eight to 10 inches of rain? We're within feet of overtopping the Riceville Reservoir. What if that over tops, and you get two more inches of rain in the Woodbury Valley, or the Worcester Valley? These are the reasons that the regulations and proven planners suggest that you go a couple feet above the 500 year, because in terms of the value of the, I mean, I think I looked at what the cost, if you think about the cost of a tuition for a student per year, and how many students in the building, and what that opportunity, the loss cost would be for students in this building, it's like $35,000 a day. So if you had to provide space for the students, is that what you would pay? I don't know, but it's as good a guess as any. So, and you can't do remote learning, is my understanding. Nope. Agency of Education. Don't be, she's not a discipline. She's not a discipline. We've had it very, very long. It kind of gets at the heart of the issue, right? What does prudent planning? And I think the reason we're having this meeting is to get the community to start talking about this issue. What constitutes prudent planning? Because the master plan is going to be those, the seasoning that you sprinkle on all the other projects that get to the level of granularity that I'm sorry, the lady who left me is asking about. This is gonna set the table for those projects to follow, and what are the conditions and circumstances around how those are planned and executed? Does that make sense? Just one quick comment is, it might be the elephant in the room, but the community conversation is still very, very much on the merger of Montpelier with U32. So that's something that's a conversation that really needs to be addressed and managed before you will be able to, I think, really move forward on any of this. This was a fascinating presentation. It was really great, and I really appreciate it, but that conversation is alive and well here, so. We're very aware of that, and all of these things, like what are the conversations about the merger? What are the conversations about big flood mitigation measures with dams and stuff? We're gonna be tracking and keeping our ears to the ground, but we also, you know, have to proceed sort of as if that's not going to happen because that could take years, and the school district needs a strategy in the meantime. Yeah, master plans can be redone. I mean, if something changes in five years and the schools merge, there should be another master planning effort, you know? I think it's worth noting just really quick, Jill, that even if that was to come to pass tomorrow, the school districts merge, both school districts need every square foot of school that they have. There's not like a spare school created by the merger of those two districts based on very preliminary looks at the size of the schools that you have, the populations that are available, and where the enrollment is. It's not like enrollment is going off of a cliff and all of a sudden, oh, we don't need this 100,000 square feet, so problem solved. You know, we'll make it a sports complex that you would still need a building either on this side or somewhere else, even if that merger happened. Point B, and I get it, is does the town get it? And the other point is if you move forward with any of this, it requires a vote. It won't matter if that question is not satisfied in the community's mind, because they won't vote for any of this. Yeah, and this process could eventually lead to a vote or a bond or something down the road, but this is a master plan. So this is like a series of principles and ideas about a recommendation about the best way for the district to proceed with addressing climate resilience, addressing aging facilities, addressing enrollment projections and evolving pedagogy, those four drivers. So there's basically given all those factors and what's happening in general, what's the best strategic direction for, and because the question is, what always happens with these old, these buildings that are older, it's a valuable asset, but like the community's gonna have to ask themselves, okay, to flood proof this building is gonna, let's say cost $5 million, right? And then you still end up with this island surrounded by water. Maybe we build a bridge over to Memorial Drive, but like, is that worth the investment, right? Does it make sense to invest in a new facility that's not here because it's just gonna keep happening? And so those are the kind of questions really we're gonna try and grapple with and hopefully have some answers, yeah. So that last example you gave was really interesting I think because like some of your examples are fascinating about looking within a school, within the building, but then to say, how does this fit into the entire community is a different level and it's not necessarily 30,000 feet, it could be yet 100 feet, but it's more interdisciplinary or more cross institutional or whatever the right work would be. So you were talking about the commission seems like that information would be important sooner than later in the formation of a plan. Yeah, and like I said, we will definitely keep our ears to the ground and make sure we're informed about what's going on. But I think- Luckily for us, we now know our good friend, Jamie Raybeck, they're trying to commission, so that's good. Yeah, that's fine. And I've heard that David and Cam say this is if you knew what the answer was, you wouldn't need us and you wouldn't need this process. And I go back to the Waterbury example. On that project, we were asked to look at state offices in a green field somewhere, state offices in another place in Waterbury, state offices as it ended up. And I don't think anyone thought that tearing down 22 buildings and building a brand new one at a certain elevation was the answer at the beginning of that process. So there may be a solution here that none of us has thought of yet. It takes into account not just flooding and physical things, but the needs of the community of course. Yeah, we don't come to this with a predisposition. No, I'm not saying no. Yeah, yeah. Back here. Does your, it seems like maybe the planning goes in this direction, but I just want to, it does it account for it, because when we talk about where are these facilities, the vital importance of having schools as a central place in a community, walkable for as many students as possible. The talk of moving things starts to really discount the value in a town like Montpelier of having union where it is, this where it is, main street where it is, what that means physically, psychologically and everything else in the community, let alone if we're talking about climate change and climate resiliency, walkability is the future, right? So I guess it's a question to you. Is, do those considerations enter into the type of plan that you all are doing? I could see, yeah. And I think earlier about what the community values, that piece would probably come, I would imagine knowing our community that that piece would come to the top and that's important to know, right? It's important for the school board to know and it's important for future boards and future community members to know as well. I can strange questions as I'm not an engineer and I don't know what could be possible, but are all of our buildings as tall as they could possibly be? Or, if we're talking pie in the sky, just throw stuff out and we'll be envisioning at the next meeting, or are there some that structurally could handle other spaces being added on top of them? Good question. It's all out of my house. I heard our expert not answer that question. It's possible. I asked a follow-up relating question to that and I mean it seriously, because I don't know if this is like an engineering kind of thing that's like ended in the 40s because it was just kind of crazy and crazy expensive, but you know, you see the historic photos of very large buildings being elevated, rotated, moved, et cetera. Like, are those? You know, just down to our own barrier, we're one of the first projects in engineering ventures over town was the old Jones Brothers building, which is now the Bury Grand Museum, and that was a huge building that we lifted four feet to pull that out of the flood plain. And Cam, we were doing a little preparation for this and he had some videos of massive buildings being rotated and moved, anything's possible. Yeah, we could just pick this building up and tell us where you want it. And then the question ended like versus turning it into a bathtub, what's the cost of one versus the other? Right. That's a great question. We're happy to get a cost estimate. Well, the cost estimate at some point, that's one of the options. So there's some other questions, Rue and then Joe. Two quick questions. Is it worth putting, should this be an area of refuge or a school, an area of room? We're putting them there. And then in terms of- Would you speak louder, please, because it's hard to hear. Yeah, and then the other question is, will it be an area of refuge, was the first one. Yeah, thanks. The second question goes back to the, kind of the obnoxious slides you showed at the end and you're just kind of curious of those, are those the things you need to sell to the community? Because I know that very competitive employees, that's how we're designing workplaces for. Because they value, the people going into the workplace value that, but they also value that as a value generated because it's an opportunity to exchange ideas and meet people. So it's not, it's less than just a student amenity, but it's a business thing and they're, the school's preparing them for their school environment. Is that a harder sell for people, like communities who are used to the desks and rows? Yes, it's a harder sell. I think it's a harder sell because we're talking about school building. If you're working for me, why change it? I think that's constantly a thought and quite honestly, if we're talking about building construction with schools, I think staff probably is an afterthought. Students are the forefront of any kind of construction, or when you think about schools, adults aren't the people who you're thinking about. I think there's so many tangible benefits to some of this kind of work too, like when you're, all buildings need renovation, as they age, that's just a fact of life. And if you take the opportunity to do those renovations skillfully and with purpose, it doesn't actually cost that much more to do good design. Because, and we're architects and yeah, we're kind of expensive, but we're far less expensive than contractors. And that's not a knock on contractors, they just have a lot of things they have to get done and they're responsible for building something that's gonna stand out and stand the test of time. And so, it doesn't cost very much more to make it beautiful and make it very, very functional and do those explorations to make the space worthwhile, because you already have to renovate as part of the course of ownership. So that's one thing. And it's worth noting that these are local projects and they're delivered at very competitive prices. They look really great, but it's partially because we have such low expectations as a culture, as a society. And I think part of what we need to do is we need to challenge those low expectations. Does with some creative design and some thought that you can do exciting things that at the same or low, less cost that. At least repair costs. I know Jillian. No, go ahead. All right, so I was just, more of a comment. So I think it's awesome that you are doing this master planning because there are a wide variety of potential funding opportunities that are available at the federal level that are potentially available as like FEMA hazard mitigation. Just, it's like an absolute alphabet soup right now. But if you have no master plan, you have no ability to take advantage when the opportunities present themselves. And the vast majority of our school districts do not have a vision and a master plan for where they wanna go. So even if funding became available, to Cam's point, what you get is a lot of small scale, kind of generally mediocre upgrades to schools that maybe are helping students be warm, safe and dry, but has nothing to do with their learning environment. They can't see it, they can't feel it. It's important to have functioning HVAC, it really is, right? It's important that the building won't flood, it really is, but for like the student experience or the teaching, the school community experience, it all looks the same. So having, going through this exercise and I agree with Dave, I think we should go high in the sky. Let's go for the vision of what we would want. You know, if we think of school buildings as minimum 50 year buildings, what do we want from our buildings 50 years from now? And I think that it's fantastic. Thank you, Libby and Andrew for doing this because it gives us the opportunity and we will have a direction, right? We'll have a goal so that as things like the planning commission works out or as potential big FEMA projects might come along, we can say like, ah, yes. And this is how we have this vision for our school district that we want to plug into this conversation. Because if they asked us right now, hey, FEMA can put a hundred million dollars towards, you know, re-envisioning downtown for flood mitigation. What does Montpelier High School want to do? What would Libby and Andrew and Jason say, right? They don't, they haven't gone through this process. So I super applaud it. I'm very excited. I think it's very, very cool. You guys are doing this and you know, I'll be there to help you like scrap up every piece of money I can buy. Because that's my job. Any other final questions or comments? Yeah, I don't have too much more to add. I lost some lines of what Jill just said, so I appreciate that. I really appreciated the framing and seeing this vision. I'm really glad you talked about spaces for neurodivergent and making sure all kids' needs are met. I really appreciated thinking about whole child approach. I really appreciated Mia's comments around making sure we have a lot of teacher input. I think that's really important. I think I'd just name a couple of things that I just really encourage is, to your point about low expectations, I really hope we think big and think about the next 50 years. I think that's really important. My partner and I in my eight year old just bought a house down the hill. We've been renting for several years and we moved closer to town. I hope we have a robust discussion about merging with U32, but as someone who wants to live in a walkable community and wants to see my kid, who's struggling right now with a lot of things, be able to walk to school the first day we moved there, that was huge. That was a big thing. It was a big deal. And so we took a little bit of a risk buying the house that the floodwaters came right up. And I want to see this community thrive. So I think all of these conversations do fold into one another. I'm really excited about this. And of those low expectations, I hope we kick our needs up. I hope we tell our state and federal folks that this is what our kids need, this is what our teachers need, this is what our communities need. It's gonna cost more money. And we need to not shy away from those conversations as well. So I hope- So pay attention to the legislature. Yes, I hope, yes, yes. I hope these conversations won't just stop here, but that we really impress upon our elected officials that we need to be thinking of our schools in this way. Thank you. Thank you. Time for these two gentlemen back here, come on in. Related to that, I think this is sort of for you all, it's just kind of to put it out there for the community because this surfaces in many meetings. Just a reminder to everyone that the discussion of facilities is not an academic exercise. It affects people, it affects the students in our schools today, tomorrow, next year, two years, five years from now. And so that, you know, because I think there's a lot of short-term, long-term planning, but these students are living this stuff now. And one very specific example that I would raise in terms of when we decide what facilities we are or are not going to give our children, I have good knowledge that children who are being asked to share the track at U32 are not being welcomed at a human student level in a very nice way. It's affecting them. It's playing out in people's lives because we're not providing that facility here. And I just want people, like, it's not an academic exercise. It's a, yes, it's a financial, yes, it's a facility, but it's students who are living their day-to-day lives four years of high school, however long it is for them not to do the math. And these decisions affect them. They're affecting them yesterday, tomorrow, and it will, every day along the process as a community do or do not decide to offer them these facilities. That's one example I can offer that I don't think gets factored into these discussions. I have one comment and just one quick question. It occurred to me being here tonight that although we live in a really engaged population and intelligent population that, and this may seem sort of rudimentary here tonight, but many people may not understand what a master planning process is, what the process is that occurs, what the desired outcome may be. And I think in order to get the most engagement and participation, there should be some really clear messaging on what, again, may seem very basic in here tonight for the rest of the population. And then my other question is really more nuts and bolts. I'm just curious how much deference there is in this process for the broader utility of these facilities and what if any of them may have reached their functional lifespan as a modern educational facility anyway. I think they all are beautiful buildings. They all have a lot to offer whether or not they are 21st century educational facility. Through rehabilitation or life support in some cases is a big question for me. I'm just curious if that's part of this master planning process is outlining whether or not there's a managed return here at some point for some of these buildings. That's a big question. Yeah. No, I, yes, yes. We will, you know, there, I call it like the old car conundrum, right? Like when do you stop putting money into that old car and buildings are different than cars, right? But it's a point where it's just like are you throwing good money after bad? You know, that's why I was talking about like if all of the flood mitigation to make this building last through a 500 year flood is so much money that it's just, and you still end up with an arc surrounded by water, is it, is that the best investment of the, you know, the community's resources? Question mark, you know, because the building was built in 57 and renovated in 90 and it's, it is what it is. So I don't know the answer to that and it's really not even my place to say it's really, you know, community conversation. We'll present the pros and cons and, you know, what the possibilities are, but it's really, you know, like I said, it's a community conversation decision about what's the best way to, you know, spend the community's resources. So thanks everybody for coming, a really great conversation and look forward to hopefully seeing some more, some people back for the Disney Workshop by December 5th. Thank you. Yeah. It's got a number of us. I am, it's the only spot I have. We'll get our subspeedients spread it on yours. So that we can see more people to come. Okay, thank you. Thank you.