 Production funding for Lakeland Currents is made possible by Bemidji Regional Airports serving the region with daily flights to Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport for information available at BemidjiAirport.org. Closed captioning for Lakeland Currents is sponsored by Niswa Tax Service, tax preparation for businesses and individuals. Online at NiswaTax.com. Lakeland Currents, your public affairs program for North Central Minnesota, produced by Lakeland Public Television with host Greg Gilmour. Hello again everyone and welcome to Lakeland Currents. Tonight we're going to be talking about a comprehensive facilities plan with District 181 and that's the Brainerd Area School District. And it's my pleasure to welcome Lane Larson who is the superintendent of schools and Steve Lund who is the director of business services. Welcome to the show and welcome to the spotlight of trying to get new things going in facilities. This is always a challenge in our modern-day world across the country, not unique to Brainerd. Steve you've been probably involved with this project longer than anyone because Lane is fairly new to the district. Fairly new, yeah. So what can you tell us about the development of the comprehensive blueprint for 181? You know we've been at this for a while now. We've been at it for nearly three years and it has transcended a few superintendents. Lane's picked it up from where it was left off when interim superintendent Bob Gross was here but we've done a lot of the work that really we did before Lane arrived was a lot of research, a lot of gathering of the core information about our facility so we knew kind of the scope of what we were dealing with. And really from that point is when Lane arrived and really took and put the plan together of how we take that information now and really develop a plan for our facilities for the future. So a lot of that information that we worked on was about our demographics. We really wanted to take a look at what our enrollment was currently but then really look into the next decade to see how many students we're going to serve out for ten years. The other big piece of that was really getting an understanding of our school buildings themselves. So during one summer about two summers ago we engaged with a consultant engineering consultant that worked with our district staff and they scoured our buildings from the basements to the rooftops and really looked at everything that we ought to be paying attention to from a maintenance perspective for the next 10 to 15 years. And we really quantified that and put dollars to it so we could understand the scope of those maintenance things that we were dealing with. Then we could take that and put it in in terms of how we should be addressing those maintenance things not necessarily from the perspective of just simply continuing on doing those maintenance items but what should we be doing from a long-term perspective with perhaps updating or even replacing some of our facilities. So a lot of that work happened before Lane arrived and we were able to kind of deliver that work to her and then the school board charged her with the question of what exactly do we do with it from this point. And now we're implementing a six phase process to get to the end zone and we're very excited. We, last November I brought forth to the Board of Education that we determined the major goal was to provide facilities that provided opportunities, innovation and success for every learner. And we set eight objectives that we were looking for looking at the safety and security of all of our buildings to the educational needs and the technology that we need in this 21st century. We talked a lot about workforce development and the importance of career and technical education and looking just as a huge overview of how the community and us can partner together to provide what we need that covers the core values of the community. Keeping in mind the taxpayers' generous investment into something like this. And so we talked about what our objectives were and then we set forth a six phase process to get there. And that's where we are right now. We are working on the first five phases and we're kind of in phase three and four right now. I can kind of give you a brief overview of what they are. The first one is an extensive communications plan from the very first day through the duration of our district. What meeting the needs and answering the questions that our public has as we move forward through any kind of a project regarding the district. So tell us then about phase two. What is that? The second phase and this was the one that when we took a really serious look at what had been done before and that I felt that I needed the most was to hear more from the public. And so we talked about listening sessions. I wanted to have listening sessions both in amongst our district to hear from the people that were in the educational setting right now, the teachers, the support staff, the bus drivers, everybody as to what it's like to work within the district, what are the strengths of each of the facilities and the working environments and what some of the concern areas were. And then it was really important to me as well that we really got out and we talked to our civic organizations. And we went to as many different community people to get our message out. We held meetings at each of our 12 buildings and to hear about what people believe the strengths are and what some of the concerns are. To date we've held well over 100 meetings both within the district and outside of the district. So we continue to do the work in phases one and two. But now the board has moved us into the third phase which is looking at some additional surveys and assessments to get some additional information so that they can make the best determination and plan. And some of the assessments are, like Steve said, our demographic study was right on so we've kept that. We're looking at some GIS mapping that is going on of where the growth is within our school communities. We also are doing some scientific surveys. As we speak, there's a telephone survey going around where 400 of our constituents throughout our school district are being called and asked approximately 80 questions about the school, what they believe are strengths, what are some areas we should consider, and just learning what the values are of the district as we move forward. Also at this time, we're really excited because we have an online survey on our new website, and our website that we want everyone to go to is blueprint181.org. And on this website you're going to find all the information that we've accumulated to date, and then the survey is also there. And it takes about eight minutes. And we're hoping that we'll get thousands of people that will come online and fill out that survey. So for all of our listeners, we hope that you'll go to blueprint181.org and answer that survey. So that's the third phase. We're collecting more information. And another piece of this is we're doing extensive financial study of how we can best fund different aspects of the project concerning the 12 buildings within our district. The fourth phase of this process then is putting it all together, getting the information, bringing it to the board of education so that they can make the best decision with all of the information that we've been able to collect. And that's where we are right now is in phases three and four. And when the board has all the information that they need, then we hope to go to our voters very soon, potentially next spring, and ask for support for some kind of a bond referendum within the Brainerd district. And that's where we are in this process at this point. Nothing to it. Yeah. It's been really fun. It's been great to visit with people. Steve, what are the demographics showing here for this area? Yeah, it's a good question. So when we did our demographic study, go back to we kind of use the base of that study in 2015. At that time, we had about 6,400 students in the school district. Now, keep in mind, we're the fifth largest school district in outstate Minnesota, so beyond the seven county metro areas. We're a big district in terms of both students. And geographically, we're 517 square miles. So when they looked at our school district and the potential growth that we have over the next 10 years, the consultant who was actually the former state demographer for state of Minnesota at one time, she put together an enrollment projection for us that took us from about that 6,400 students up to a little over 6,900, not quite 7,000 students. Now, keep in mind, that's over the next 10 years. So it's about a 500 student growth. But if you really break that down for us, it's growth of about 0.7. Somewhere around a little less than 1% per year. Growth is growth, and growth is good, especially for us at the school district. So we appreciate the opportunity to have the ability to grow like that. But it's not unmanageable. We feel it's manageable growth, and we're going to start preparing our facilities to accommodate that. We know we're tight already on space, just on the amount of students we have right now. So to know that we ought to try to position ourselves for some growth in the future, we got to get a start on that, knowing that we're already tight on space. So how many seniors will you have in your senior class this year, roughly? So typically what we do, we plan to graduate about a class of 500 every year is really what we've seen. Sometimes it'll dip a little bit below that. Sometimes it'll dip or extend a little bit higher than that. I believe our highest class size right now is about 550. Yeah, one of our classes. And on the low side, I think we've got one in the 470 range. But on average, it's around 500 per class. I'm a Rainard graduate, and there were 360 in my class. So it's grown quite a bit since then. It really has. And with that, you have 12 buildings in your inventory. And you have Forest View would be your newest building, the middle school that's here. But you have some really old buildings. Yeah, so we've got in our fleet of buildings, we have 12 buildings that we care for. And the oldest one is Washington, the original Washington high school here. And really, we've had to rely on that building as kind of a stop-gap measure for us to accommodate some of our growth we've seen in early childhood. So do you have classes in there? We do. So if you walk into Washington right now and stay on the main floor, you're going to see a lot of early childhood programming going on. And when we've seen growth in our elementary schools, we've traditionally had some of that early childhood programming in our elementary schools. But as growth has happened in our elementary age children, we've had to pull some of those classrooms out of the schools to make room for those elementary age children. And we've utilized that first floor of the Washington building to do that. So that building still gets a fair amount of use. And it's going to be celebrating its 90th anniversary here soon, constructed in 1929. That one is starting to near its century mark. So that's our oldest building. And then of course, you can travel all the way down to our newest building, which is Forest View, constructed in around 2004 time frame. What's interesting when you look at the 12 buildings that we have and you kind of look to see the ages, you can kind of travel along that graph and show that about every 10 to 15 years, we've added a new school into our community. And up until Forest View was built, it was the high school. So that one was built. Actually, that one will celebrate its 50th anniversary. That one's been with us now for 50 years. So a half century, constructed in 1968. But what's interesting is that we as a community took a 35 year gap or break before we constructed our next building, which was Forest View. So just if you put that in kind of some simple terms with 12 facilities, if we were to add a new one or replace one every 10 years, by the time you got back to that first building, it would be 120 years old. Now, if you stayed on a 35 year replacement cycle by the time you got back to that first building, it would be 420 years old. So we need to find a little bit better balance for when our community reinvests and updating their schools. We know it probably shouldn't be 35 years. We've seen a history where it's been about every 10 to 15 years. So we're really taking it into account in our planning and some of that replacement cycle information that's interesting to look at. I found, I went on your website and pulled up the Blueprint 181 and you have, I think probably the key questions most people would have to ask listed on this, along with the answers. Why do you need to create a long range facility plan, which is a good question and what role the local residents play and what's happening with enrollment, which we just talked a little bit about. And you've got another question here, I think that's really interesting and that is what's the most pressing need in the school district right now? I believe the most pressing need is space, particularly in our elementary schools. We are using every free space that we have in our schools. We are over capacity in all six of our elementary schools already. And with that 0.7% increase each year, it looks even more drastic as we look at a 10-year projection. That's a huge issue for us as far as the six elementary schools. Our high school too, we've got a south campus and a north campus and we really believe that we can have a more efficient use of our space and efficiencies if we put all of them on one campus and take care of that facility that we have. We know that Brainerd High School is just a perfect location in the center of downtown Brainerd, right off the river and it's just a lovely area and we really wanna take that space and realign it so with educational adequacy that it needs to provide innovation for coming into the next 50 years. In the past, there's been periods where the legislature's helped school districts, someone in the merging process and consolidating. I know they don't do that anymore. Is there any state monies available to you folks in the planning process or if you go into an implementation stage, help me, I can't say the word. Thank you. Is there any state money available to help with that or is this strictly gonna come out of the local coffers? I'll put it this way. Over time, there have been different funding mechanisms that the state has offered local school districts to be responsive to accommodate needs as they come up. We've always had some of those funding mechanisms that have been available to us. We haven't really taken advantage of them. Not that we haven't been responding to needs within our school district, but we've been very strategic about it. So we have a lot of these funding mechanisms that our school board locally has the authority to do, which is governed by state statute and enacted through the state legislature, but a lot of them have been underutilized at this point. So when we look at our approach to developing the plan from a funding perspective, is to try to maximize those funding mechanisms that we already have available to us to try to minimize the amount that our local taxpayers would have to burden. So as we look to try to find all the financial pieces to put together, those that are gonna follow this issue are gonna see a lot of these different funding mechanisms that they maybe haven't even known to exist at this point because we haven't used them. But we are gonna now gather up some of those as we look to put all the financial pieces together so that at the end of it, we have the local tax portion be about is the minimal part that we possibly can. Now, that said though, we know that when we look at a plan the size of our school district that when we got 12 buildings that we're gonna attend to, we know that the size of the plan is probably gonna be noticeable, okay? But we know that at the end of the day that taxpayer bond portion is probably gonna be the largest portion of it, but it's not gonna be the only part of it. It's not gonna be the only thing. So you have one building in Niswa, I'm assuming the elementary school there, the rest of them are in the Brainerd proper. We have Forest View Middle School and Baxter Elementary Schools in Baxter. Brainer and Baxter. So are you looking at closing, eliminating any of those older buildings in this process as you implement this down the road? We are looking at a couple of the buildings, one in Baxter and one in Brainerd as to what should we do? But what we're first looking at is each of the facilities that we have, our public has been very clear about they really love our small town neighborhood schools, the elementary schools that are smaller and kind of a family feel. And so it's come very clear as we've had these listening sessions that the public really wants us to keep that kind of a flavor in our district. We do have some issues though again regarding the space and for instance Harrison Elementary which is an older building that has a lot of deferred maintenance that has to be attended to. Right now what the board is doing is they're having us look at every building, what are the options? If we repurpose some of these buildings or if we replace the buildings what would we use the other facilities for? And right now we haven't made any decisions but we're bringing all of the possibilities to the board and then we're going through each of the buildings and prioritizing so that the board can make the best decision. So you're not really at that stage yet to make that decision. We're just collecting all the data. You have to have that decision maybe before you can really put a dollar figure to what it is that you're gonna do. So in the past Franklin Junior High's closed on Whittier Elementary, are they the only two in school? Well in the old high school. But the old high school originally was just kind of an administrative building for a while until you started running into space issues. Correct, yes. Yeah, you know like Lane mentioned we've done over a hundred listening sessions. And we've heard a lot of input. We've gotten a lot of input and we've folded that input along the way into our planning but we've heard a lot of different messages consistently across the school district. One of them is we love our neighborhood schools. Clearly, they cherish the neighborhood schools and we're gonna try to develop a plan that retains the integrity of a neighborhood school environment. Number two is try to utilize as many of the existing assets that you have. And so we're trying to find a plan that does that. It may look at taking an asset that we already have or a building that we already have and perhaps repurposing it. Trying to put it to a little bit different use that's gonna be a better use for that facility. Like Franklin has been. For Franklin, for example. But I think even within our own organization if we look at some of our facilities that are perhaps in elementary school right now that are being taxed with space issues that could perhaps be used for different programming that don't have the same kind of demands on the facility. So we're really looking, we're scouring our existing assets to see how we can perhaps repurpose them to make good use of what we have. Now we're clearly gonna be faced up against some buildings that you have to look, you have to take into account the pure economics of it. When you've got an aging facility that's maybe perhaps a smaller facility and when you take a look at the amount of deferred maintenance that sits out there and divided by the number of square feet it really starts to come very close to how much it would cost to simply just replace it. And you got to start to factor in some of those things too that may even say well that building could really be repurposed and used for something but does it still make economic sense to do that? So we're really wrestling with a couple of those situations as we kind of roll through our planning process here. I don't think people realize sometimes the buildings look so nice from the outside. What they actually cost to maintain and run when they have almost no insulation in them or very little insulation. And I know from having worked in this district most of my life, you have spent a lot of time to try to make your buildings energy efficient. And I know Forest View at the time was very high tech for the time that it was built. And I know that you've got people that go into Harrison or whatever it is and try to make these efficient as you can but like you said you do reach a point where the efficiencies are no longer there without doing something different. And if it were being repurposed those costs are still going to be there for the next purpose that you're going to use it for so that becomes part of the issue. It was kind of interesting and kind of unfortunate when Forest View was built it was just a short time after that that the paper mill closed. And there was a real controversy going on in the community that people thought that the school district knew that was going to happen and they tried to get this bond through as fast as they could. So to me people should really appreciate the fact that you are really spending a lot of time at the public level with your meetings talking about what it is that you're trying to do. When you started out as a teacher nobody said you were going to have this battle to do in your life did you? It's not an easy thing to do as we have seen across the state. Many districts with real need have not been able to pass some of their referendums and others have stepped to the plate and made huge differences there. So I think you're really being very pragmatic and very cautious about trying to get this information out. And I like the fact you're not jumping ahead of yourselves and saying we're going to close four buildings here because those are the rumors that get ahead of the facts. You said you have a fair amount of people who have already responded to your survey. And is this survey, will this be open basically all the way into spring? It'll be open until the 18th of October. Oh just until the- So we really want people to go online now to blueprint181.org because we're looking for as much information. And then these kinds of meetings that we've been going to these listening sessions they're going to continue all the way through this. And if we are successful with a bond referendum we're going to continue to have these kinds of opportunities to talk to the public and let everyone know where we're at in the process. And one thing that really prides me with this Board of Education that we have in Brainerd is they really believe in that community partnership that's focused on providing educational excellence. And we know that if we work together with our communities, if we work together with our local college, if we work and have strong K-12 system that that's how we make things make them happen so that they really represent the values of our community. We certainly don't want to do this in isolation. We want to do it as in a partnership. And we're just really excited with the process and the opportunities we've had to visit with our public. And we want that to continue throughout. One of the questions you have in your website is how much will this end up costing taxpayers? Well, obviously you're not really ready to answer that hat. But prior to adopting the plan that you're going to identify and then publicize that budget widely before you go to the referendum level. Is there anything else you'd like to add to that? You know, I will say that we're positioned well as far as financially speaking. The debt that we carry is the remaining debt on the Forest View Building. You're basically your only outstanding debt. Yeah, that's about it. And that'll be expiring in the next about four years. So as that debt begins to mature and roll off, we expect to structure debt on potentially a new project to kind of fold in behind it. And if you fold in the debt kind of at a very similar structure and level, you can create a tax impact that's kind of quite minimal. So we're really exploring a lot of different options to try to maximize the amount of work we can get done at the least amount of tax impact that we can. When you say you're running out of space right now, are you seeing that more at the elementary level or at the middle school level? Or at the elementary level? One thing that we've said at every one of these meetings we've gone to is that when the school district decided to build Forest View Middle School, they did it really well. They have it the right size. It functions so well so that each of the four grade levels that are there kind of have their own mini school, it just functions beautifully. And when we look at deferred maintenance and needs there, there's very little to do. And this building is 13 years old. And it was just really handled very well by the public and we are so appreciative of that because there's little to do there and we can focus on some of the other needs throughout the district. It doesn't seem like it was that long ago. Yeah. 13 years ago. Were you here, Steve? Just before I arrived. Just before you arrived. Yeah. They finished that project up. A beautiful facility. It is. I don't think we thank our community enough. It's really a marriage of form and function with that building. It's just an efficiency from a numbers guy and it's just a super efficient setup too. So we're out of time. Yeah. But I want to be able to let people know that if you're interested in doing the survey or if you're interested in looking at the frequently asked questions, please go to Blueprint 181. That's www.blueprint181. And you can pretty well get the answers to most of the questions I think you have. And if it doesn't answer your question, I'm sure you can call the school district. It'd be a happy to help you. Thank you for jumping on the program with us. Appreciate it very much. And good luck with this endeavor. Thanks for having us. You bet. You've been watching Lakeland Currents where we're talking about what you're talking about. I'm Ray Gildow. So long until next time.