 Good evening. This is the Fort River School Building Committee. This is our meeting on September the 26th, and we are in the police station community room, and this meeting is being taken by Amherst Media. Our first agenda item is, well, I just did a call to order, to approve minutes from the previous meeting, did I send them around? Yes, you did. Okay, good. I just sent you back one week, I will. Okay, and I made that type of change. We have a motion to accept the minutes, or are there other alterations? Actually, I should probably ask first. Motion to approve minutes. Second? Second. All in favor? Aye. This is our public comment, period, and I don't think we have anything to make comments, and so we can move to the next item, which is meeting minute recorder. We do have a new meeting minute recorder, who I think I passed as I was coming in, and once she gets back, we'll do an introduction. And so we'll move on to the viewing progress. Yes, thank you very much. We did distribute some additional material for you this evening. I see you have it before you, that's good. I did prepare just a brief agenda of items that we wanted to talk about. John and I see that we've already included them on yours, but I know we have distributed material to you in the past in loose form. Our intention is to compile all of this information and create a report for you, but we thought we would distribute it as we produce it. Not in front of you are the reviews of existing conditions in the building. We've had structural engineer visit the building. We've had mechanical engineers. We've had site engineers as well as architects come to the building. And I believe we've forwarded three of those disciplines. I know that architectural still is lighting behind, but we will get those to you as we finish them. We thought we would deliver material as it's being developed, and then later compile it. And then we'll edit it as we go forward as well. Now, since the last time we met, we have gone to visit Crocker Farm as well as Wildwood. We promised that we would. People kept saying, you have to go visit Crocker Farm. Crocker Farm is a great school. You gotta go see it. So we did. And it is a great school. It's got a lot of positive features about it. We'd like to share some thoughts about that this evening. Also, since the last time we met, we've had a meeting at Fort River with special ed folks. And the reason for that is because we wanted a greater understanding of what kinds of activities occur in the spaces that were labeled in the plans that we have received from the school. So we did do that. We also had a good meeting with the librarian at Fort River. And then subsequently, on the 20th, we had a meeting with several librarians, one from each of the elementary schools. So we went to share that with you as well. Jesse has updated the program and square footage analysis, now including also Crocker Farm, so that we can prepare schools because that would become a subject of discussion, I'm sure, in public meetings. And then this evening, we would like to share some initial concepts, some layouts, if you will, programmatic layouts that are done to scale, but they're not architecturized yet. They are scale drawings, so that it's an allocation of program. And so we'll walk you through that. First, some observations of Crocker Farm. So I did distribute to everyone this print out of several snapshots that we took. Crocker Farm has a gymnasium, just like Fort River and Wildwood do. Of all of them, it appears to us that Crocker Farm is the smallest. And it seems to be adequate for the activities that were occurring there. You have one gym teacher. If you were to go to a second gym teacher, then maybe it would be inadequate, maybe you'd have to divide it into teaching stations. It has a wood floor. There was all this activity in the room when we visited it. One of the nice things of Crocker Farm is the courtyard arrangements that are within the footprint of the school. It brings a lot of natural daylight into the interior of the building. Unlike the courtyards that are at Fort River or Wildwood, which are way too small, and part of them are blocked up and you can't even get the daylight into the interior space like you can. So we really like that architectural feature of Crocker Farm. The library at Crocker Farm is smaller than the other schools. However, it's described as a favorite place in the school. Everybody seems to really love that library. And there's different zones in the library that function very well with different kinds of seating, comfortable seating, as well as study tables, as you can see in the photos five and six. There are computer stations in the library. So the library is intelligently divided into different zones so that you can have multiple grades, multiple classes in the room, all doing activities at the same time. The cafeteria is pleasant space. It has clear story windows, round tables, storage on both sides of the room, and the corridors have very nice cubbies, a well proportioned. Photo tent is a courtyard with a resilient surface. There seems to be three different themes of courtyards. There's a soft courtyard, there's a contemplative courtyard, and then there's this active courtyard with a resilient surface. This one happens to be closest to the sixth grade. And preschool. Pre-school, you do this one. Yeah, preschool. So pre-school, thank you. And the pre-K or pre-K classroom, which are on photo 11, they have direct access to the play areas outside. It's very nice arrangement. And then there are these cubby alcoves within classrooms, as you can see on photo 12. We have seen that occasionally in schools not be successful on that chair. If there's been any problem in these, in this kind of configuration, sometimes there's a real log jam of activity in these spaces. And sometimes people have been critical of activities being unseen because it's sort of a blunt corner. But I don't know if that's positive or negative experience in that part of the point. Yeah, most of the cubbies in classrooms are not in this configuration. This is just in that addition that was put on. Yeah, just the pre-K zone, yeah. That's sixth grade. That's sixth grade. Oh, and the sixth grade too. Sixth grade, the second story had, I think with that, is the other is far just a wall of the classroom. So we, at the end of the tour, we understood why everyone said you had to go to the Crocker Farm there are some very good aspects to it. Mike, you were to mention. Sure, let me interrupt you. Go ahead. That the population at Crocker Farm is 420 students. Just kind of right now. So it's also, yeah, that's one of our target enrollments that we're looking at. So it's helpful to look at that school for that reason as well in terms of its overall square footage, which you'll see we've added to our square footage tracking sheet. It's also a three sections per grade school, which is basically what 420 results in. Right. So one of the differences between Wildwood and Fort River is the number of special acronyms. Am I interpreting them correctly? I mean, you've kept tally of that. There's a fair number of spaces that are labeled Special Act in Fort River and these spaces are quite large. And I think I made a comment once before that we have a phenomenon in which we have existing building, existing footprint, and so by default the rooms are larger. So it's not the kind of room that you would necessarily plan if you were planning a new building and having maybe only six people or eight people in a room, you would normally plan a room that's smaller than that. However, at Fort River, you have these large spaces. There are also a few differences between the Special Act rooms, between Fort River and Wildwood. Can you help describe with that those differences there? Well, I think you see it, due to Wildwood student population being higher, you're really running three sections per grade again, similar to Crawford Farm. And so in your quad, which has four classrooms in a quad, they can only allocate one of those rooms to Special Act. And so that in Fort River, you often have two of the four rooms allocated to Special Act. So I think that's where you see that additional space in Fort River because it's available, that's because the student population is less right now. I did also want to share with you something that I discovered on my shelf in the office, which is this publication. This publication is one of many publications that was published by the Education Facility Laboratory, which is a nonprofit organization that was funded by the Ford Foundation. And I think they started them by the 50s, 1908 or so. And I can't find the date of this publication, but I think it was around 1965, because some of the plans that are in this booklet date to schools that were built in 1965. So this evening I distributed to you some excerpts from that, which is in this handout. Why am I bringing this up? Because, well, I find it interesting to see how schools have changed over the years. And why do they change, I kind of wonder. So, you see in photo one, you see this open classroom at Fairmont Elementary School in California. And then there's another example of an open classroom in another school in California. And then in photo three, you'll see a diagram of a school in Utah and that has these quad classroom configurations. Each of these classroom areas to house four classrooms. So that was a concept that was being talked about at that time. I'll get to that in a minute. But I was also intrigued by this teacher workstation in this school in Ohio, as you can see, and it has these plywood fold down desks, built-in desks with the scissors, hinges. And then, son of a gun, you have the same sack that's had been at Fort River School. It's like the detail was copied out of this book. So, what were we thinking at that time? What was the Educational Facilities Laboratory, which was proposing new and innovative school planning not only at the public school level, elementary level, but also at college and university level. What were they thinking? Well, if you look at the board of directors in this body of people, it included the chairman of the board from the Lever Brothers Company. It had the chairman of the board from IBM. It had Ford Foundation. It had people from universities, superintendent of schools in Chicago, an organization in Detroit. So what was going on at that time? Well, Detroit was pumping out automobiles. IBM was occupying huge open floor areas, open offices were the thing. If you look at headquarters in office headquarters, you can see that kind of planning. And so, it may be that that kind of thinking leaked down into the educational sector and thinking that, okay, you know what, let's make open classrooms, flexible space, we'll change departments, we'll reconfigure very easily. And I think that's sometimes what happens. This is my opinion, that people think of schools as workplaces. So, if you look at schools way back, you know, when people were being educated to enter the workforce and the assembly line, so you had a lot of bells and cells kind of a configuration of space. And this was the era of the open classroom. It didn't work. It didn't work if people were now changing things. But if we were to think about how people work today, maybe there's something that we can learn from work spaces today. If you look at how offices are being planned, right, work spaces are being planned right now, you have places like Google, right? So where all kinds of activities occur, where food is present, it's a much richer kind of environment. So anyway, I just wanted to share this with you because when I discovered this, I thought, well, this is an interesting piece of history. And it might in public discussions about the existing school be interesting to the public about where we were and where we may be going in the future. So, let's talk about libraries because we did meet with librarians and we did observe that the library at the Fort River School is large. And I think we reported that last time that it was a large compared to the MSBA guidelines. And it's larger than the proper farm. And its collection is quite large too. According to the librarian, there are 34,000 volumes in Fort River Library. In my experience, that's a whole lot. We're just finishing up a library of school construction right now that has a school library in it. And it's for a population of 374. Thank you, 374. And it has only 13,000 volumes in it. And the square footage of that is very close to the MSBA guidelines. It's not a Massachusetts school. Nevertheless, it falls within the state guidelines. And what I did is distribute to you some floor plans to show you the kinds of activities that are planned for that library. So we have large group rooms. We have maker spaces, technology areas, computers, quiet study areas, adult seating. And there are variations of that layout in every page, you see variations. All of the furniture in this library is on casters. So the furniture can be moved around very easily. Also, the shelving, except for the shelving along the walls, all the shelving in the open floor area is also on casters. So it's very easy for staff in this future library that will be open in just a few months. To reconfigure it and create a place of assembly, for example, that was one of the things that the school librarians pointed out to us, that they needed to have a space for places of assembly. They might have a guest speaker, for example, an author, an evening meeting. That's all taken into account in the planning of this new library, it's a school library, and that can be easily achieved simply by moving the furniture around. I'm bringing that up because square footage is directly related to cost. And this committee is going to have to make some difficult decisions about square footage and cost. And this is probably a good time to talk about square footage and give you an update on the program and square footage chart that Jesse has distributed. Okay, so you have the chart, I assume. So since we last met, we've refined the chart relative to a couple of areas. The first we've added Crocker Farm, existing conditions, adjacent to the Fort River column. Those are the first two columns on the left side, after the ring type column. And it seems helpful to add Crocker Farm because it doesn't have the challenges of the open classroom in terms of defining room areas, for example. And it's an example of a school which you're telling us is something that works well for the student population of 420. So now we have both we can compare our proposed room areas against. The second thing we updated on the spreadsheet is the special education rooms, which I think we should come back to and jump ahead to the media center because Richard's speaking about it now. As you can see, the media center we've proposed is the same one that the MSBA guideline recommends. And it's actually slightly larger than the media center at Crocker Farm. And we're recommending this size media center because of our experience in building media centers, such as the one that we've put in front of you, that we can achieve a variety of the zones for learning, create a learning commons, a lot of different learning opportunities, and also have a collection of a reasonable size. I think we're asking this committee's opinion with regard to the larger collection that you currently have. I did ask the question how the collection is acquired. I asked if there was a district-wide media specialist or a library specialist. And I was told no. I was told that each librarian decides what they need to purchase. And perhaps there's some duplication in the purchases. I haven't gone through the collection specifically, but I think that needs to be visited again. So you met up with librarians this week. Did you talk about this question, about the collections and what the philosophy is behind it? Any questions? We did ask the question. We were told that the collection is based upon the faculty needs, that the faculty goes to the library and meets that collection of books. We asked the question if there was duplication. We were told no, there really isn't a duplication. But I'm raising the question to this committee. I asked the librarian if she could provide some resource material to explain that in more detail. She asked if she could bring in some library standards. And I said, by all means, you should. To help this committee understand the reasons for the size of their collection. That's another point of comparison. How many volumes does Wildwood's library contain? 28,000. So Fort River and Wildwood are very close and the outlier is front and far. We don't have that information. The collection is at the rocket farm. I thought you said 13K. No, no, no. But just based on the visual, it's going to be significant. The Wildwood and Fort River have just a ton of space and they have stacks of books that go up higher than the librarian prefers. So on one hand, we're being asked to make lower stacks and to make assembly space, which we can do with flexible furnishings. But at the same time, if you preserve their collection count, you'd actually need more space, as they're concerned, than what you currently have. So I'm not sure the librarian feels that they have the authority to say they can reduce their collection. Is there any concern I have about asking the librarians? So I was also at the library meeting and I asked two questions. One was about duplication, because even just sitting there and speaking at that time, I was noticing the shelves and there were quite a few duplicate titles. This is internal duplicates and we'll have two... Yeah. The exact same book, multiple copies of the same book. We were sitting at the Wildwood Library, by the way, at this point, so I wasn't at the Port River Library. And I asked, what is the degree of duplication and is that a standard that needs to be met to have some duplication or can you live without duplication? The other question I asked was, of the titles that you have, what is the actual use and how many of those titles have not been checked out, have not been used in the past, you know, pick some timeframe, ten years or something like that to know what we have 34,000, but we're really using 20,000 or so. So they didn't have that information at the time, but I think that's really critical to find out. I agree. I know Lady worked really hard over the summer actually to call a lot of the collections. She did. Well, I'm just reading the newsletter we got and just for reference, it says, in the first week of school, Fort River students checked out over 850 books in the Fort River thing, so if they're checking out different books, that's close to 1,000 titles in a week and if there's how many weeks in a school year, it's a different look. Two books per child of the population of 420. So, I mean, just based on those numbers, it doesn't sound unreasonable for a collection that large, but I totally agree. Maybe there's other ways to go about circulating those books into that space and elsewhere. So as someone who's working on the library renovation at a different type of school, this conversation could go on for hours and hours and a lot of... I don't think it's anything we're going to solve today. We could go down about it and hope talking about it wouldn't really get anywhere, but I think it's a really important question and so I'm not really sure from this committee, simply what our role would be or not in exploring that question. I think one way for us as a group to frame it is that at the study level that we're at, we want to be able to give our designers a direction based on our collective best judgment. Knowing that, and this particular topic, it sounds like there should be really a district-wide conversation about what the appropriate... if there hasn't been, if there hasn't been, right, there's all kinds of ways to do that. But we can't, as a committee, necessarily wait for that to transpire because I think it sounds like it's something they could spend quite some months figuring out. Yeah, I think what Maria was asking about... Sorry. About what's the percentage of books being checked out. I think that's the number that we need and it's going to tell us more or less because they can check out 850 books, but how many of those are going to be checked out next week because those are in high demand or the popular connections or maybe there's a subset of... of the 34,000 maybe there are 3,000 that are checked constantly out and then that they love throughout the year, so we need to... I think we need the number. Well, we certainly can put that question to the staff. Whether they can give us that answer in the short term, I don't know. But maybe we may at some point relatively soon here have to make a call about, okay, we know this conversation isn't done, but for the purposes of this exercise we want you to use this side. Fair enough. About a month from now we would like to start turning over information to cost estimators. And square footage is one of the first things that has to be done for cost estimators. So, you know, the strategy for storing books can take different forms. It could be perhaps distributed throughout the building. We've seen that too, where the collection of books is in shelving in classrooms. I see someone shaking their head. No. But it's a strategy that some facilities can take. It still takes space. It still takes space. I could just extrapolate then on the 13,000 because I kind of hooked onto that early on. That was a school that met the MSBA and made recommendations for a population of our size of what we're looking at. So, is it fair to say that that 13k is the target that would fit in the floor plan that you showed us based on what you would recommend for the population of Fort River? Yes. So, we're talking about reducing by 50% the collection. More than 30%. You're going from 34 to 34. Another way to frame it, I think I would like, if we can, divine that how much of this collection is really used, if we can. Yeah, and I think it's critical that we get the Crocker Farm number. I'm sure we can acquire that number because part of this is about being comparable. And a lot of ways at 420, Crocker Farm is a very interesting comparable. And if we don't have other ways to kind of come to a place to direct you, that might be a place. You know, even if they have more than the MSBA, I can imagine a, for parity purposes, case for saying, well, let's work to what works at Crocker. Well, I think the square footage on Crocker is actually 5% less than what you're recommending. Yeah. So it's actually smaller. It's actually smaller. And if Crocker Farm works... It may not be a bad moment. It may not be a bad moment. I don't expect a decision tonight. But as I say, in about a month's time, about four weeks from now, we'd like to start releasing information to cost us. Okay. So do we need to define a process to collect this information? I think if we could ask you to follow up with the librarian at Crocker Farm and I suspect at Wildwood and Fort River to see if they can give us some notions about how much of that collection really is actively used. I mean, I don't want them to feel like we're telling them they're going to have to cut their collection because that's not our place. But it's, I think, an interesting metric we would want to know. Yeah. One of the challenges we have is that we haven't always had... I guess we haven't had the superintendent to hear a lot. We haven't had the principal here all the time either. We don't have any of our teachers. We don't have any of our staff, which is nice. And I don't... I mean, we need to flag this for the principal. Because we can't butcher the current space and basically radically change the program for the media collection and just sort of present that to them. Well, and I wanted to ask... Quite right. Even asking the questions, I don't know what it would be like here, but we could be stepping into a huge controversial... You know, it could, like, start getting things like, they want to start getting rid of the books. I mean, it could go from finding out what the situation is to that. I just think it could be... I feel we owe you information, right? And so some of this is difficult conversation, but I think that's the nature of this study. We did share this with the superintendent prior to the meeting. We had a favorable response in general. Now, with regard to this specific detail, I think you may need to flag. We should flag down something, okay? I also just... I'd be fascinated to know if that favorable response was actually thinking through the implications of, let's say, publicly presenting in January that we're having the space for our media center. My guess is the answer is the analysis wasn't that deep. That's why you were showing. Yeah. That's why it should be flagged. Yeah. We need to continue talking about it. It creates the same thing on us with the special education space. But it also gets back to other things that, you know, there's certain things that the district does differently than the MSBA would say is the standard, and it's a choice that Amherst makes for perfectly valid reasons. And likewise, we could choose to go a different path. That's a very good point, and that's a very good point, and that's why we started this whole assignment that we have from the town, too. Let's start with an aspect. Let's put in words what your curriculum goals are, what your educational goals are. If you can justify to MSBA that you need a collection on this side that these are the reasons why that's the position you should take, regardless of what the MSBA guidelines are. But we will have done a good deal of due diligence and understand what that guideline wants. So, yes to everything, but what we also have to remember is that, as you said, every bit of square footage is additional cost. There is not an endless pot to choose from. Every additional square foot also, you know, has environmental impacts, no larger buildings. So there are costs of many forms to square footage, and we are going to have to... The point of this is not to present something that is not feasible, that cannot pass all kinds of other muster. So the hard truth is there is not going to be a 4,700 square foot library media space that exists now, right? That's just not going to be possible. We need that square footage for other things as well. So I think we have to start thinking in those terms and big picture, because everybody's going to want to protect their turf. Have you done campus work in the past? Have you been involved in campus facility planning? This is what happens in campus facility planning where you have department heads and square footage is pushed into the world. I don't want to... I think you have an order of things that you want to talk about, but the other thing that jumped out to me is when you said that the gymnasium at Cracker Farm appeared to be smaller. According to your square footage, it's 25% smaller, and I think that's a notable difference. Thank you. I was doing this from memory, and, you know, Jesse's done a great job in actually accurately tracking things. So you're right. It's quite a bit smaller. Right. Whereas to continue on, I thought that MSB, a guideline for the gymnasium, would be twice the size of Cracker Farm's gymnasium. It's quite a bit bigger. Right. And it could be bigger than what form we were asked. Right. When we discussed this issue of the previous meeting, we were asked to proceed with the larger gymnasium. And so we have in our initial studies, but I think that's something that required more discussion as well, meaning to be flagged. So let me ask that question then. So if we decide to recommend a smaller gymnasium, because that's what seems to be working already in all three elementary schools, would MSB have a problem with that? And I think not. Yeah. I think in keeping the existing gym in a renovation scenario, no problem. I wonder about building a new gym that's smaller than their standards, if they would fund that? The reality is their gym size is based on a regulation basketball court. Right. And the reality is, at least for the school purposes, that's not necessary now. There's an enormous demand on town gyms for park and rec and all kinds of activities. So there may be a desire to add to your inventory of full-size basketball courts, but it's probably not going to be driven by the educational needs of the school. I'm not sure who had their hand up first. Yeah, I was just going to point out, I don't believe Crocker Pharmacy any weekend basketball programming, whereas Fort River and Wildwood do. I'm not 100% sure about that, but that's my impression of what I've heard just by reading the parks and rec thing. And it does seem that what I've heard from parents is that it does not function for that purpose well at all. And so it does seem a need in a town using Crocker Pharmacy comparison is kind of a tough one in this case because it's not serving the same purpose. Right. So in the spreadsheet, it's the segment that has the widest discrepancy between the two schools and the one school and then the recommendation. So aside from being based on a full-size basketball court, does the MSBA assume any other secondary use like assembling that would happen in the gymnasium as opposed to a media center, which has sort of been our... Or cafeteria. Or cafeteria. Yes. Yes, they do. And they like a stage or a platform to be part of that configuration so that it can be used as a presentation before the assembly. We'd be encouraged to zone those public access spaces in a way that the public can enter them without getting into the academic part of the building. Yeah. I'm sorry. So I think it would be fair to say that going anything smaller than the current Fort River and Wildwood would, you know, try intentionally putting in something the size of Crocker Farms gym would make no sense. You have to be at least as big as what is already there. While we're talking about the multi-purpose use of a gymnasium, I think we should talk about is a gymnasium or a cafeteria better suited to that function. I can speak for how it works at Crocker Farm. I can't speak to how it works in other places, but having it be a cafeteria auditorium, I believe it has less impact on programming. And Mr. Shea would be the person that I'd ask about that. So if the MSBA wouldn't ding us for having something less than 6,000 square feet and we could have something maybe a little bit more so that there is a little bit more space, maybe have bleachers on one side of it that doesn't need bleachers on both sides or something like that, maybe we could hit a happy medium there to serve that role of public use, school use, but get the cafeteria in play a stage. We actually have configured school to have the stage that operates both ways, both sides, to the gym side and to the cafeteria side or functions as a standalone classroom for music purposes as well. So to see that in a new configuration, we could get that to work both ways. One of the nice things about having the stage face the cafeteria is the cafeteria is used for a new period of time. And so if you have different kinds of physiat activities, like if you're trying to set up a stage that kind of flicks with the program. Eric. So, I mean, Puerto Rico definitely is used for recreational basketball. So I think it's valuable to think about whether the size it is now is actually even adequate and I've been down there a weekend when there were families in basketball going on and it's a pretty crowded environment. But also, I think people love Crocker Farm and they're very attached to it and they say very positive things about it. I don't know that that's the same thing as saying that all of the spaces are optimally sized. And it's also particularly loved in comparison with Elton Ford. I was saying purely as a facility the communities, people love all three communities. And so I'm just not... I guess to my mind, it's a little bit like the conversation with the media center is the sort of position that we seem to be taking, which is a reasonable one, I think, is if we can look at alternative scenarios from media centers that are smaller and they seem to function in the MSBA guidelines say this seems like a standard size. It's not that we're saying we want to just default to that and not listen to alternative scenarios but the point is we're saying let's understand what the justification is for being larger and even if it's number 4300 square feet maybe it ends up being whatever would be larger than this 3400 because we're actually a rationale for having to pay 3400. I don't know. But the point would be taking the standard and then seeing why would we be deviating from it. And so I'm just saying the same thing about the gymnasium is I'm not sure there's any particular reason to be in love with the size of the gyms we have now. And if they can be larger and function in a more diverse way with the community events or recreational events I don't think that's a bad thing. And it could be smaller but if it is we should try to think about what the justification is for being smaller. I wouldn't default to the idea that because Crockett works we should just cut a thousand square feet off of it. I would say if somebody coaches basketball in that very gym the Fort River gym is not adequately sized. There's always overflow onto the coordinate it actually creates a dangerous situation sometimes so I thought that needs to be like the minimum I would think. So I would say I wouldn't go under what we have right now but I don't know if we need to go to the full size. If we are doing a renovation I would like to keep the gyms informed we don't have to be all we need to have a 6,000 square foot so we need to be a completely new gym whereas we have been in the one day and maybe they're away so we're proposing some of the space around it to give them some more footage to put bleachers without having to say it doesn't have this volume that we need so we need a completely new one in our renovation. If we are going to complete new building it's a different thing but if we are going with renovation or at Renault we will try to see how can we use the current footprint of the gym and maybe add some footage but maybe we don't have to go all the way to the 6,000 because we were saying each square foot is minus so we have to optimize. Square foot is minus I couldn't have said it better myself. I have to follow up on that because I had the same exact thought that it seems to make much more sense for a renovation project to keep as much as we can like it is because it's certainly a cost savings but as a feasibility study I'm really concerned about providing information to the community in a digestible form that really compares apples to apples and if we make heavy compromises for the renovation that we don't make on a new construction I'm really afraid that people are going to say look how much less expensive it is to renovate they don't realize all the compromises that went into that and so I'd be really scared about programmatically changing things between the renovation and new construction. They need to be fairly comparable they're never going to be exactly the same but I think they need to be a little bit of balance. Once you're renovating you will never be exactly the same completely in construction because in the construction you can define exactly renovation you need to adapt the existing conditions so to put exactly that people won't understand that you're saying in this situation we have maybe a gym that's 15 or 20 percent smaller it's not giving credit to the whole population I think we can be clear on what are the main differences where some of the cost cutting or savings that comes is okay this has a media center that's 10 percent larger this one has a gym that's 10 percent smaller. We can put information like that but to be to us ourselves to do a design where the square footage of everything is exactly the same I think it should be us in the foot. I do think you need to disclose to the community where the compromises are if you're going to be comparing a range of options which is what we're supposed to be doing then we're going to have a minimal approach and we're going to have the ideal approach and then there are pros and cons to each of them so I think we need to disclose that information I just don't want to radically different we're going to be making a lot of compromises when it comes to environmental sort of operational things in the renovation just because it's also the nature of renovation you're not going to jack camera up the entire maybe we need to the four inch slab because insulation underneath it so I think that's something we need to keep in mind that we end up with enough of an apples to apples that we can in three sentences or less explain to the community what the comparison is if we end up with something radically different I don't think because people are going to look at two numbers and that's all they're going to look at and explain in very short hand what the differences are we're setting ourselves up we're not getting well the other thing that will come up is then it calls into question one of the two options if there's a radical difference in square footage so if the small one works why are we spending all this money on the new one and if you need the big new one why are we selling for one that we've already established doesn't work so you do need to get a certain amount of parity and yes there's going to be a certain amount of plus minus you know 10% based on you know the existing conditions and that's something as a group we're going to have to kind of keep our eyes on to make sure that we are keeping this equitable between the options so there were a couple of hands that were up I know Marie did you have something to say I was just curious actually when you're working through the report and I know this is down the road are you going to include some of the analysis or work that's going on right now meaning in other words here's what we saw is the existing usage pattern in the town here's what MSBA would typically suggest here's the conversation of what we learned around why we would recommend something that's either similar to what's the standard state standard or up or down from it and I don't know if you go as far as the plus or minus say what you think about the drawbacks or benefits of that but to me I'm more comfortable with looking at whatever the range is plus or minus 10% different things if in the end what people can do when they look at the information at the end is they can understand what are we doing now what are we proposing to do how are we typically done pluses and minuses I don't know if that makes sense I'm not looking for a book I know that could be like 3000 pages it could be a book but you need some executive summary that kind of distills all of that data into common sense language that the public can understand and what it is that they're buying we have the data here I can imagine you know there's a spreadsheet with the agreed on program and then the comparables your other schools and then a remarks column that explains in any area where we deviate significantly why we deviate and then there's a little paragraph committee thought based on talking staff and future use that we wanted to go up most of the columns it'll be self-evident we had no discussion but for the items where there is deviation and we've had these discussions there'll be an asterisk remark one and then there's a little commentary on why the committee decided to go to the bigger gym I just think that's really useful because this is an excellent moment for this sort of reflection again that the product of this committee is going to end up going into some other process that then eventually ends up building a building so really what we're trying to do but it's not intended to be so the point being is the more the information we have here is legible transparent somebody can follow what the information is what it tells you where the different standards come from what the implications of different choices are and then see what the cost and other implications like including environmental or energy efficiency we move the discussion in this town forward by miles and to the extent that we don't do that obviously it's more like here's our recommendation but then people are like well how'd you come up with that then it's you know it doesn't mean there isn't a recommendation I'm just saying I don't mean there's no point to it I'm just saying people can unpack it and they can delve into it and as far as environment is concerned that's another thing that we need to start initiating in about a month or so we owe you some energy modeling so we will like to start doing some energy modeling of different options I think that that is really important I mean we've been focused on up front costs with square footage but understanding you know target EUIs and the energy modeling and what it costs to run and maintain these buildings with renovation versus new construction is really important that's correct you have a figure here that I like to call below the line that's below the line initial cost what about the next 20 years so we would like to flesh all that out as part of this report so with regard to the report we've started to structure our work so far along the guidelines of the MSBA feasibility study report thinking that if you're accepted to the program you can potentially use this work as whoever it is that does that next step and they do have a requirement that you outline the deviations from their guideline for each place where you make a modification so in a way that may be exactly what you asked for and then we could in that narrative refer back to the Fort River and Drucker Farm precedents in town so that it works for people in town so if that sounds alright but I think the difference I'm asking is that it deviations from the MSBA guideline as the standard okay are there any other things you want to point out in the chart before we start discussing the options well I went past the special education section because it's complicated but I think we should touch on it at least so you can see in the first column we can go over the gross areas for special ed the Fort River as we mentioned is sort of spread out into open space and it's 12,000 square feet for those programs whereas Crocker Farm is much less than 6,400 now there are some major differences of course Fort River has both the AIMS program and the building blocks program which are special special education programs it's the best I can do with district wide that's better so we proposed more space 7,200 square feet to account for those programs in the Fort River school now as you wonder how did we get to these breakdowns with regard to the AIMS program and the building blocks program we met with the district wide special ed administrator I forget her name right now but she helped us determine room requirements for those programs so I think that's fairly accurately represented and then with regard to the remaining which is your special education general special education your ELL, speech, math, reading all of these specialists who actually function in the classroom for a great percentage but need to pull students out for focused instruction we've allotted spaces for them based on your staff counts at Fort River currently so and giving them spaces that in our experience will allow them to pull students out and are more along the lines of the kinds of space you see at Crocker Farm the difference being at Fort River the pull out space is often a very large space because that's what's available so I'm generally describing the strategy we took I don't know if anyone here has that fine view that would be able to weigh in on that but tell me how do we proceed can we proceed along these lines this is more of a question than a Jen McIntyre on that view I'm wondering if there was a discussion with Jen about you know we have a line in here for the breakout spaces per grade and how that that's certainly not going to serve the purposes of a names or a building blocks program but it seems like at least in my head those spaces start to fill a little bit of ELL and a little bit of reading and a little bit of math thank you for bringing this up we noticed the RTI rooms at Crocker Farm which is the it's it's a thank you so there are there's two of these rooms and they're basically multi-use spaces that reading, ELL, math can use to pull students into they're not labeled any one person's room and that seemed to be a very smart use of space each one are there about 550 square feet each one has about three teaching stations approximately so you'd say well that's six teaching stations for Crocker Farm for the two rooms and we have in our program instead six breakout teaching spaces which are associated per grade but each one is smaller 150 square foot it's like one teaching station so I think that's the intent of these rooms yes I'm just wondering if we those should maybe be listed as special education or if they should be like I can move it down to special education I don't know if they're actually they're general education I mean there's such a crossover I mean there's a whole like categorizing special education separate from general education it's kind of a false dynamic anyway but yeah so I'd like to hear more I'd like to hear that talk about a little more we have reading, ELL, math all in the special education category I guess it could all move up to core academic as well and I don't think my spreadsheet it matters relative to my spreadsheet I guess what I'm listening I think the ones on the top are for the classes that are cod taught so they're cod teachers so what would I think for River there is one class per grade that is cod cod teachers and I think this would be the space the cod teachers usually have a space in the quad also to pull out kids so I think this is what they're referring for the cod for the cod teachers of the grade so there's one classroom per grade that is cod teachers did you have the chance to talk to any of or observe the differences between a cod taught classroom and a classroom we observed a cod taught classroom briefly it's been a lot of time and so on the space diagram like when you look at the existing Fort River there's no sort of indication of difference so basically the default at Fort River is all the classrooms are the same square footage but we would start to try to distinguish it between cod taught classrooms it's a square footage difference from what we observed but we did in our layouts put two classrooms next to each other thinking those were the cod taught classrooms the cod taught classrooms well no the breakout areas I think is the where the additional teacher so maybe it's not this breakout space would not be available for ELL or or math intervention or why is there a teacher in the breakout space? well it would be a special ed teacher could be a special ed teacher if that's what's scheduled but it isn't necessarily if there's some activity being done that's part of the general education so it could do both my fear is about being in the general education slot is that we're reducing general class size to the way I heard you talk about this before looking at the numbers clearly is that you were pulling a little bit of square footage out of each of the general education classrooms to sort of make that square footage available for this pull out space but if it's really you know we and Amherst do keep our special ed children at home and it's something we're really proud of and something I think is the right thing to be doing but it does require an acknowledgement that we need more square footage to do that and if we you know don't give it its due and we're kind of taking away from general education and we're squishing everything and then that's places aren't really used for special education they're not available to special education then I'm afraid so that's my fear of putting it or being clear about what those spaces are and where they should land in this diagram we may need to add to your point if we leave the breakout core academic we may need to add a multi-use breakout for special education use and is there anything like in talking with Jen Mack was there any of the spaces that were sort of being used that way that are now currently labeled as special ed I guess those are the ones that are oversized right now that are sort of filling up half quads because there's not a classroom in them any multi-use special education space in Fort River we were asking them to define the use of each space but that didn't come up in that way it was always a space that was given to a certain type of staff member so when you were talking with Jen Mack which specific spaces were you talking with her about just like the building box program and the games program which to me is just in the special ed A and special ed B and special ed CR1 those are their primary spaces and as far as I know those intensive programs aren't making use of what's labeled as special ed but this is one parent's perspective this is why we need the principal I generally agree there's only one small satellite space that they use outside of that that's what's primary as well we had all the staff there that went through defining each space and who was using it how many people are in it what is it being used for and that's how that diagram got identified that was purely based on the staff that were there and they said how it was being used so in that meeting were these sort of breakout spaces everything the sort of intended you know 150 feet of sort of I don't think we necessarily got to the the fine detail of how much square footage partly because I think there might be some rightness to this that some of what's in the quads kind of filling in the available space I think you had a diagram or two of how some other options that other schools might lay out and so at a certain point I want us to have an adequate discussion about you know the pure numbers of this but part of it also gets to looking at examples and possibly at some point circling back to the faculty and saying okay this is what we thought we heard these are some diagrams for you not just generic ones did we hear right what these were we do need to do that but what I'm hearing right now is that we may have missed the breakout areas as general education areas not the special areas and there was a little discussion about that I mean I do believe the co-taught the teacher who specializes in the more special ed side of the co-taught classrooms I do believe they use those spaces to take kids out I think I thought I heard that but I know what happens at least occasionally in my son's classroom so I think there is that component what others remember from that conversation I think they might take out some key but also they'll go to all the other rooms it's not that somebody that is going to only go to this other room I think there are multiple people each one have their own office right now sometimes they go there sometimes they go there so it's not that there's going to be kids sitting in those spaces I think if we do get these options illustrated and then circle back I think there will be more clarity but we still need to do that I think it's a way to plan diagrams it's a way for them to get a little bit out of what they're used to doing because I sense a little well this is what we do and it's awfully hard when you've been in a school for many years and always done it that way to really step back and be a little bit more broad perspective about possibilities I think it would be good but also to circulate the program I think I really like the fact that there are multi-use spaces that it's not that everybody is associated in this room this is what happens and only this can happen I think they're having the flexibility of maybe grouping different again for space and savings they're having the multi-use where people can go there to work instead of always you're talking about the RTI sounds like the way it sounds like the most comparable thing to what we have up here on the breakout teaching space is the RTI, right? is that what you're saying? no, I'm saying instead of having all these lists, if you compare all the lists of special education all the lists of rooms for the proposed versus crocker farm it's very different components so I guess in some of these has to do by having multiple use rooms instead of having one room for a topic we would have fewer rooms potentially if we went to an RTI like a crocker farm but at the same time it would give you the opportunity of having a larger room instead of having two small ones to have one larger room that you can bring a larger room instead of having to have a third room that is larger because you might have a larger meeting on the breakout teaching space I don't feel like we've fully resolved this conversation I don't think we're going to resolve it actually because one, I think the point that was made a moment ago about trying to visualize this makes sense but two, there's also just I hate to put it this way there's sort of a practical question I mean if you take an illustration of what you're proposing back to and then talk about how different spaces are conceptually programmed based on what you heard they're either going to say, oh that makes sense or I tinker with it a little bit or they'd say, oh my gosh you missed the kind of space and it may be nobody's fault and maybe they didn't talk about it but then as you're visualizing the change they say, you know honestly you could use another 150 square feet per classroom or whatever it is or they won't say that that will happen and I think that's a worthwhile thing I think that's a worthwhile thing to do to me that's if we think there's an actual potential programming need that exists in the building we need to come to we need to figure that out in addition to the question whether they're creative ways is there any suggestion of solving that need but we have to identify if it needs even there or is this in fact adequate and does in fact need there we haven't done that no I know that, that's okay and I suggest that there's hardly anybody except for you guys that do architecture that's going to look at the space table and say yes, yes I think I'm going to tell you that it isn't always that easy on that side the table either doesn't know that you've hit it I think one other thing I'm looking at this table my concern is that it's designed for the current staff of for we were right now and as we know we're building for future so it has to have flexibility my concern is if we have too many small rooms then it might not be useful in five years down the road I think having rooms of different sizes with multiple purposes give us more flexibility down the road and we are not stuck with having cubicles so I think we have to don't make the same mistakes of the past that we've taken because we have this list of employees right now that we have to have exactly the same thing maybe we have to be flexible because maybe we don't know what's going to happen in five years, ten years from now so instead of having no walls you don't want to have too many walls I'm kind of hitting the same but I haven't once not even distributed what you could do is plan a building so that let's say there are modules that are classroom sizes that you could easily subdivide and have different uses but you could easily go back to a large room and just make sense for 25 people not to move us oh just one tiny comment I was just interested to see that the special ed toilets currently are 22 square feet and the standard is 60 square feet so yes they're really awful for a special education okay I think probably we beat this up enough for now can I have one more comment on the table or why not I have a comment about the then and our food services so the square footage is the same but instead of having a small room we have a stage of 1000 square feet so essentially seating space gets reduced by 1000 square feet between the proposed and what we have right now you're saying that you think we're dropping the stage no the question is the stage is a space that there's no seating in that area yes so essentially doesn't work going down because right now we have 36 total 36 square feet for seating and that's how the continuous work and right now we will go to 28 so more than 10 percent 15 percent smaller than the current situation would that essentially work so I know that that's the suggested by the MSBA and the size based on feeding the school in two seatings but the schools there's two waves per room so it's all schedule sequentially sort of it doesn't all begin at the same time it's actually six waves six waves is what I remember it's three in one, two in one and one in one so all of that makes no sense that's six right? the current limiter is the kitchen floor so it's not that the seating instructor that makes it not work currently it's the lines through the kitchen the server the server is undersized right we could fix that but would you be able because of my concern is having three seatings two seatings two seatings because usually now they separate by grade so that would mean that you have mixed grade seating and I don't know if that's what the district is so I don't understand what your question is so right now in the dining you have 36 square foot but then oh I see if you add those two together yeah those two together because the three are used my issue is how the district does it, the school does it we would have to change them, we would have to go mix grades and that's something to us I believe that there are mixed I mean I think there's mixed grades I don't think it's not just like okay all first graders eat it's more than one grade they do one cafeteria one grade it's size for two seatings through the entire school you certainly have the flexibility to go one grade at a time to do more seatings you have more than enough lower grades than upper grades you can do that again maybe the visual will help I remember something Diane said she said something like I would love to have only two seatings speaking for her right now that would work for the custodians put you down for a yes vote there shall we move on to some diagrams yes we are attached to this chart for several diagrams we have a site plan and we have floor plans for creative options so is it necessary or helpful for me to pull it up here you have it all in front of you my one question is for the camera can you get it I'm pointing to things okay it was like really big it was that long okay do you want to walk us through the first two diagrams are the existing site and the existing building this is the existing site you understand you currently have actually seven buses that drop off of the school we've illustrated six because one leaves early but you could fit the seven here if you need to the current drop off is large enough for your buses the vehicular drop off is not so great in the current situation you're bringing the cars in towards this back corner I understand the students are let out from this door behind the it's actually kind of from the middle of that cafeteria not from there but from the right there and then come around the corner and then walk them up we go to the parking lot for pickup there is no lineup for pickup there is a lineup for drop off so how the kids are handed hand with their parents to their car in this town you sign up so parents leave the car go to the cafeteria and then walk them but for drop off this situation happens which the queue I was told is not very long anyway it's five or six okay and then there's three vans which I'm told also drop off in this parking lot I suppose they could also go to the lower one but that's our understanding right now one question I have about the buses is I guess by the inherent age of what we're going to do things are going to change but if we were a bigger population is there enough bus drop off if we really were at 420 I don't know how many extra buses that is but do you know about Wildwood how many buses there 6 or 7 6 or 7 how full are the buses right now it varies wildly I think there's one bus that is very full and the other ones are not so there's one bus that is very full but not the others we can make an extrapolation about the buses or so or if we can work with someone who can tell us the answer that would also be great it's a good question we also noticed that you have a paved play around the gin a pretty large area with a practical purpose you have some playgrounds next to the gin matured at least one of them is sort of overgrown with weeds at this point and then there's a paved play area near the cafeteria which is of course the opposite of the school there's this restroom building here which serves the fields and then there's playgrounds 5 to 12 play around the paved play area and then in the fields it looks like you have two baseball fields but there are also a couple of soccer fields imposed back in this area in the soccer field here which didn't make it into our diagram but we're aware of that there's a third baseball field it's the worst one but it's below that top right it's underneath it it's just got a back stuff oh like over here? yes so homeruns go into the parking lot okay I didn't even see that okay and you have 180 parking spaces approximately and I hear that's adequate staff counts under 100 the school we've handed it out before and I'm not going to walk you through the school now I think I better move on and talk about it so let's keep going the weekend parking it's certainly people back up all along that drive but as far as I know it's never spilled out all the way on the the north side but when the soccer fields are full this whole zone people park all the way up the driveway but I can't remember is if people actually take the effort to park down the far end or not would you have more than 180 people for soccer? certain times a day it just seems like there's a lot of kids and a lot of parents and grandparents but I don't know how much of his laziness and how much of its actual just character at the same time just checking why would there are 7 buses ok so we'll work with 7 and we'll work on the scheme and I think that will be pretty accurate for the studies so then here's our first study and this is our renovation it's our sort of lightest touch we're working with the existing building area and we're adding on a little bit at each end of the cafeteria room so it begins with the site plan site plan is very similar we still have the main entry where it currently is so this is essentially the same we're now showing 7 buses which obviously fits we reconfigured the drop off sorry because we're creating a pre-k entry and these are the pre-k classrooms here and similar to Crocker Farm we noticed that the students are being picked up and dropped off from the pre-k entry door so we thought well maybe that works alright and could also work here because it ends up in terms of our interior layout working out best that way so we have a pre-k playground that we'd be creating near the pre-k entry and pre-k school the other difference is this option proposes a foot gym at this location at the end of the cafeteria and so we have one large paid play area now and then a 5 to 12 playground that serves grades 1 through 6 so it consolidates a lot of that paid play and playground area into one location so let's look at the floor plan briefly and bear in mind these are programming studies at this point we'd hesitate to call into design in any way but it's proving we can fit all of the spaces within a certain footprint the total footprint here is 83,800 square feet which is very close to what we're targeting on that spreadsheet we made a much larger courtyard at the center of the existing building which is effective at bringing light into a lot of the rooms that border the courtyard and also could be a great outdoor or learning courtyard we could have educational program there that's perhaps adjacent to the media center here which could open up on the courtyard and so in taking away some square footage we've added some square footage as well the gym as I mentioned before in the upper corner the pre-K classroom is creating a pre-K suite here in the bottom right corner adjacent to the administration but still a little bit pulled away from the rest of the school with its own entry and sort of identification to cars and buses on this side so that was kind of one idea the way this zones out is academic is in this U shape we put walls into the open classrooms to create corridors dividing the quads basically in half and all the classrooms have daylight because we've created this courtyard and they're grouped by grade we were saying we wanted a cluster by grade but also be sequential because we know that sometimes instead of having three classes per grade we'll need four so we can grab a classroom adjacent from the next grade and it'll still sort of be in the same area so it begins with kindergarten and wraps around to the sixth grade here by the main entry I have a couple overall diagrams going to be useful so stepping back from all that detail a little bit we just color coded the major zones it's kind of more important right now we have the academic support zone is this U shape as I just described we have the district wide special education in yellow here just the courtyard kind of at the center of the school we have the public core so that's your media center cafeteria, gym, art and music spaces that you want to let the public into after hours so by moving the gym we're able to include it in the public core in this area you have to separately enter and exit if you want to have a public access so that was the benefit in our views if you move the gym it can be part of a public core we'd envision doors which could be locked after hours that would stop people from going into the academic spaces and then of course the administration from the center with the view of the site right at the front door we have the general office and the nurse right when you come in and then the next diagram is just the quantification of new construction renovation versus demolition and I think I've basically described the content of this slide already so I'm going to keep you in we'll figure it out in the next sort of idea should we stop on the first one I have some questions what we can have toilet rooms I just look for those myself there are three sets yeah we've created some so you did pull them out of the classrooms yeah but both of them are still there we've retained them in the pre-k classrooms and in the kindergarten classrooms but for the upper grades they would be using the kindergarten the kindergarten is not where the kindergarten right we would have to create toilet room and solution but then they could be made accessible yeah absolutely in this kind of level of analysis we're just trying to zone the square footages correctly I assure you that they will be yeah I just conceptualizing the classroom students now benefit from a lot more French than they did before because part of the problem is we've got limited perimeter as it is put the toilet rooms on the perimeter and then they're just not big enough for the current function so yeah we're moving doing something really different my question on this scheme is our kitchen and server basically the same thing we have so far we don't have it proven on that and I realize we're early days here but that's a good point we're just kind of understanding the server is the problem I have never talked to the kitchen staff but my guess is it's a little larger size in general but from the sounds of it getting kids through that server is not an idea yeah we did reconfigure the cafeteria in the one large space and we added a stage consistent with our program sheet which is then adjacent to the music area consistent with the music room and then our orchestra and band room and then we also have an instrument storage room adjacent to the stage so these being near each other all works pretty well but the kitchen yeah we would want to think more about that and the cafeteria is landlocked right there's no daylight there because like over by the band and orchestra there's skylights because that part of the building had a weird bump up right in there right yeah these were right but the cafeteria is still the same same ceiling as everything else right it's very similar to where it is right now doesn't have much natural light I think it's a little from this courtyard which we're turning into a stage so for a performance point of view it's probably good but yeah it'd be nice to bring a window to the cafeteria for sure which you could still probably do but you probably could require some demolition yeah the cafeteria in Parker Fawn has some better stories which work very well it all makes a big difference sure I just have a question about a couple of white boxes that don't seem to go anywhere between the fifth and sixth grade classroom that is a rectangular white box and then there's another one between the general office and the sixth grade classroom are those like double doors or something so this one is intended to be the entry best to go and if we had doors it would really help because right now it's like this is the place you can't get we should identify well you can't get into any of these spaces doors are overrated very expensive no this is some additional space we have we were lining walls up on the columns and I think we need to allocate this to some of you fair enough, it's a draft yeah no I thought it storage it has windows I grabbed that in a hard piece for technology closet or electric closet so I think I made this comment before my concern is the third grade classrooms that they have the high ceilings that's where the gym is right now so either we're going to have to lower the ceiling with the second floor for storage up there that could be a solution for our storage because I have classrooms with the gym ceilings but it would be an awkward situation where we have a huge volume and then we lower it and we have a fake well we would it would be an awkward room to have a very high ceiling it would feel awkward so we would have to lower it so you would demolish this would be demolish or make a fake ceiling we would just hang a ceiling so yeah there's a lost opportunity there that there's a lot of volume that we're not taking advantage of in this option correct possibly I don't give the height though but I think placing the gym on the other side of the building makes a lot of sense in terms of selling the square bench for after school cars can access from that side that's a good place for us the only comment that's before the room what I know of I mentioned use is more space than that we have to discuss this with the engineer we don't we work pressure from that well exactly so we started low because otherwise you have to negotiate this is just our opening gambit shall I move on later second option is a larger addition but it's still a renovation scheme we have a two-story addition which ends up on the south side of the existing building and then we remove a good portion of the existing building that's the general passing in terms of the site it's all very preliminary but we kept the same sort of that you have now the main entry shifted down a little bit and we created a pre-k entry where the current main entry is and so then we have again some parking at the south side of the building and paved play and the main playground also at the south side of the building adjacent to the cafeteria and the gymnasium so it's a similar diagram this one because we've removed so much of the building footprint we really have a more compact footprint overall here which is a benefit to this option anytime you build two stories that's going to happen we've stuck in a soccer field over here it could be a baseball field possibly so to move on for now moving to the floor plan oh sorry having a psych conversation I think it's something just worth noting Christine asked me if the following station is a polling station and giving modern security around schools they literally have to have a constable or I forget what the correct term for the person is to sit there by the door and open the door for you to let you in because it's just one of the regular exterior doors as a particularly awkward arrangement and they use the gymnasium which of course means ice laden gymnasium and no gym that day and all that kind of stuff yes right just going to go ahead and keep going the core academic spaces are the north side we have the early education pre-k we have kindergarten first and second grade at the north side of the building and then in the new addition we have a new cafeteria in the kitchen with the stage we have new music rooms a new receiving area and then new district special education spaces and a new gymnasium and so in terms of and the media center ends up right in the center adjacent to another internal courtyard which we cut out of the existing building administration right in front again with the nurse and the general office going into the main entry doors going to the second floor is the upper education we have third grade through sixth grade and we have some support spaces the zoning of this one we have again the administration right at the front entry we have our public spaces gym, cafeteria, media center our music also rezoned in the right side of the building once you come in the doors and then we have some academic at the left side and coming in the doors again we envision doors that would separate those areas from the more publicly accessed areas and also the district special education could have some doors so that it could be zoned off and then we have our quantities of new construction, renovation, demolition and then our third option is our new building option can I just send just a quick question I see stairs at either end where does the elevator go oh yes, the elevator is lacking it would go in this area it definitely would be an elevator obviously I have to leave at 8 I don't think that's going to happen that's okay let me quickly scan my I don't think so okay I haven't noticed yet but I've seen some we wouldn't vote on that what, we didn't send you an invoice it hasn't gotten to us okay, for voting what? alright I think we still have Cormagos so, okay, I'm going to hand sorry it's 10.52 okay any other thoughts on this option the last one's a new building I should probably start on site so I'm going to skip ahead to 5A so you can see it there's a paint outline of the existing building here we propose a new building to the south of it we have two possible orientations for it this one is better we think for energy purposes in that most of the classrooms are facing south or north it's a little it's maybe a little awkward when you come in and it's something we could look at flipping we were just talking about that I see it now but we put all the entry and the vehicular situation on the south side and we have all the 180 spaces that you currently have we're able to separate the buses into a bus loop which is perhaps a little bit better than what you have now so that car pedestrians can be separated from that and sort of this main promenade here to the front entry which offers a lot more dropping off space but you may not even need all of that based on your current use we also have a separate pre-k entry which is allowing separate vehicular circulation for the pre-k which seems like an advantage to us and is working better in our new our new option than in our renovation option the gymnasium and the cafeteria end up towards the fields on this side of the building so we have a play directly adjacent to the cafeteria and gym with the playgrounds there and then at this end the service which also needs to serve the kitchen for kitchen trash is adjacent so that works pretty well and then this is the alternative orientation maybe this is a little stronger as you approach you see the front of the building a little more directly it's really a similar diagram now the pre-k entry is to the side to the south side and the gym and cafeteria on the north side chairing paid play playground space I'm going to move into the floor plan really briefly the main entry to the new building right in the center here it's adjacent to the general office and the nurses station and the administration suite is right there as well and then we have academic areas at the to the left we have the pre-k and kindergarten the early education we have custodial and cafeteria kitchen here adjacent to the gymnasium with a stage that operates both to the gym and cafeteria as Richard was just looking to earlier and then we have this suite for specialists we have art music media center, computer lab and then we tried something a little different here we separated the sixth grade from first through fifth we noticed that that's how it was a crocker farm principle shea said that was kind of a good thing actually that sixth grade is sort of moving on and gets to have a little bit of autonomy in the school so that's something we tried in this option and then upstairs you have the rest of the core academic spaces first grade to fifth grade and we put the district special education spaces upstairs looks like this one did get an elevator so that's great and we also have a great amount of sports spaces here it's a lot to digest and we don't expect any action on these options but we would like you're thinking about these it has pros and cons and if you get back to us it would be through you and Jonathan as the keeper questions and answers we'll get back to you with answers or update these on that so all of the designs that we've seen are for 420 enrollment correct we went to the right so I'm just wondering how the 360 would look with these because I'm looking at the 86,000 square feet but I'm not saying like all the solutions decrease in enrollment and I think we have to maybe talk about bringing that down or at least discuss it I'm curious about how do the overall designs change if you're working on 360? overall no we would have fewer classrooms it might not be that different it won't be that much different than what we've been working toward the MSBA guidelines so conceptually Jesse kind of organized them based on the public use spaces in the classroom blocks so those classroom blocks typically will reduce the public use spaces will reduce less but even the classroom side will not reduce a lot but there will be a reduction without a doubt in the size that we should evaluate assuming these options in general seem like a direction that we kind of like then we can see what happens to them as the enrollment goes down but if some of these were like just forget it there's no point in exploring that that's kind of why we haven't gone that far yet other general comments and questions? so think of them as minimal additions to getting the building zoned correctly to sort of a 50-50 scheme in the middle and a complete replacement now we haven't done a phasing analysis there will be a big difference yeah, see Richard raises a really good point and Jesse and I talk to us about the phasing of the minimal option where we're creating that large courtyard that will be difficult to accomplish in an occupied building without we have to go through the analysis but our sense is that it may end up costing as much as the medium option for example because we may need 12 portable classrooms to pull that off to free up enough space that we can keep people away from the construction area because it's too much we feel to be done in one summer to demolish the interior and come back and get the enclosure in so that means you're going to be impacting almost the entire school footprint for some period of time and we think so there may be a phasing implication to that that may make that option less bondable which we'll test well I have sort of two comments but let's say one that responds right to that hopefully not forget my other question but I think we need to look at one that doesn't then do that even though I like that big courtyard the only thing about that scheme is that we have lots of natural light in but I think we need to see the contrast of we don't cut a big hole that makes us buy 12 or rent 12 classrooms what does that look like because I think it's going to be hard for us to assess that even without the courtyard you're still dealing with a phased renovation so you may still need portable classrooms and that might be all the answer I need but that says that we may get questions if it's not looked at so am I hearing try a minimal approach? well that is my second question which is okay so we're not going through the MSBA process but does this hit the right what they would expect to do the spectrum of renovation addition new construction are we within the book ends yeah that's a good question so without doing a whole lot of work on the option you just described which is to not cut the big hole that is not unlike I believe Jesse sent you the plans of what we did in East Granby and that's exactly what we did it's a deep footprint and it stayed kind of the way it was and kind of the way you have now so you have your library media center it retains that center position because you can't put a classroom in there without windows and then it's about partitioning up the perimeter around that and we can certainly see what that looks like but conceptually that's kind of what you're going to end up with isn't Granby like third bar smaller yes that's smaller it's not as wide by a third so the idea I mean I don't think comparing and saying oh it would be the same as Granby well no I mean just conceptually you're going to have the library media center and then the spaces that we can live without windows whether it's the toilets and storage you're going to have to fill up the middle with as much of that stuff as you can and you still, that's what the study will demonstrate is whether we have enough of that stuff or we're still left with a lot of square footage that we're going to have to then use for classrooms or something that will be without windows which then becomes kind of a deal breaker because it sort of doesn't work and that's what we would have to test I have two comments about the facing can we think when we are thinking about the facing how the third quad or the third or the fourth quad or the two like in Fort Rivers and the third two used for special education that actually what we do many times there are the four quads used for classrooms so there you can have in the four classrooms placed right now maybe start looking at how moving people within the building to the four quads that can be put in the facing we don't have to move everybody else but maybe compact them into more efficient use of the space just try to face it internally maybe try to use as much as you can and the other one is also use the existing courtyard because there are courtyards that could be something else instead of having a big courtyard can we expand the courtyards that we have and actually put windows because there are courtyards there hidden courtyards I don't know how they were designed secret garden but maybe don't get the idea of how can we use the existing courtyards instead of being interventional maybe do smaller interventions in the courtyards that we have right now so two thoughts I like that you were thinking of having the gym in the cafeteria because they are more public spaces being together I wonder if, I mean you have everything moving south I don't know it makes sense to entertain anything where the cafeteria moves north and it kind of that dovetails with another question I have is that you know renovating spaces different types of spaces cost more or less to renovate so spaces that can be preserved that wouldn't you know to look at it from the perspective of yeah I can renovate this space this 5000 feet for X amount but it will cost twice as much if I renovate this kind of space are there spaces we should keep as is I don't know I'm asking would have to do that analysis but obviously if we repurposing and tearing up partitions that compounds the renovation we can limit the renovation to existing partitions locations that's simple talk about the phasing and trying to do with an occupied building maybe think of do we have hazardous materials like in all your assessments we were starting to get structural but I didn't see like hazardous materials come across because I think the district has something right we also have a few reports somewhere yeah I think it was done in my personal one I think it was supposed to be done so that would be something we definitely want to get included in the report and you know it makes me very cautious about building of this vintage built in the 60s early 70s like that was the height of the crappiest building the most poisonous building materials that's the building I thought it was the material so renovating in an occupied building that seems hazardous based on general knowledge of buildings of that vintage it complicates the phasing even more so because you have to do all the abatement basically in the summers so you have to come in and maybe abate a space that you won't get to renovate for nine months and so there may be students in the space for example where the floor has been abated and you just have a rough concrete floor until you can get in there or the ceilings have to come down to get the glue dobs and so you have a lot of space that you're not going to be working on and it looks kind of a mess until you can get there and in an occupied building it just lends to the unease of the occupants while they're all in there and particularly in school with their issues or their bad concerns about that's not going to help so those are all things that we have to be sensitive to and may play a larger role as we decide what option makes the sense typically the implications of phasing and the impact on the occupants during the construction period and how disruptive it will be a lot of communities we work with that's one of the highest criteria we're not going to sacrifice two years of students you know to get this building built if there's another way to do it without doing that and that's an extreme position but there will be disruptions and so that may very well be a factor that will weigh heavily there so I'm going to go back to based on what I especially based on could you do that go ahead I just have a very general comment about form following parking looks like site planning is a really important part of these three schemes and entries and access and I would like to see just some more thought given to vehicular turning radius on the site plans and how they influence it I'm also wondering how the parking counts were arrived at and if we're just if that's part of an MSB a standard or not it's not part of a standard so it's kind of intuitive I mean it's based upon what we have observed there it's based upon other experience we had in schools we've matched your existing parking count I think the and I'm not sure how it happens at Fort River but at Wildwood certainly when there's a curriculum night open houses or any other full school events it's really challenged and I'm wondering about how that impacts overflow parking traditionally for federal works you don't provide parking for those events and quite frankly that's a more green strategy nobody wants to pay the world for the three times a year that doesn't negate the fact that those events occur and they have to park cars so whether that's shoulders along access drives or grassy areas that could double those are realities and we do have to kind of get our arms around that a little bit so it's point to what I'm taking so I'd love to I mean I can go by saying Jonathan said a while ago at the beginning we're having alternatives for renovating it's not really alternatives I'm really thinking through the process of understanding the implications that we're doing either a renovation or a partial demolition renovation on the existing building and sort of principles we keep in the front of our minds on that so I'm assuming that having natural light in all the classrooms at the end of this process is going to be a top principle that we're going to look to do that regardless of what we really end up with and that there are other principles of having natural light into the building in general that's going to be considered important to do and I'm just saying that there are other principles that you're thinking of it would be good for us to talk about them because I'm not really speaking for myself I'm not really interested in coming up with alternative scenarios for the building that then you look at it you look at the compromise that's made and say well why the hell would we do that this isn't really a building we really would want oh we did it because of this reason and I'm saying that's important because if you're going to start looking for alternative scenarios for renovation or partial demolition renovation then it's once you're starting to make compromises based on what the existing conditions are in phasing and how you do that there has to be some sort of hierarchy and principle you're keeping in mind of saying what are we willing to try to trade off and what do we think is a deal breaker and you could check with us for some of the deal breakers but some of them you're going to know in your own professional judgment you would not personally recommend a building in X SOAR or Y SOAR so I think that's really really important the next thing for me on that is thinking about what the phasing would be under any variety of scenarios I mean if you're doing very significant and I'm assuming that you're adding insulation to the building or changing the basic heating and ventilating and wiring systems and things like that in the building even if you leave existing walls up and don't do significant creation of new courtyards you're going to be really stripping down the areas that you're working in and substantially rebuilding them so there's going to be implications for phasing anyway as well as also what materials exist and all that kind of stuff and I think it would be important to go through that to some extent about what alternative in other words when we're thinking about narrowing down the range of what proposed renovation alternatives we're looking at we should be looking at it also in that context because it seems to me that's those two sides of it how are we going to do this and what are the trade-offs and how is the process of doing it and then what are the end goal we're trying to get what are we compromising away in terms of satisfying the existing structure makes sense I think so let me try to paraphrase some of this so let's say in the minimal minimal approach you are able to reprogram all of the spaces and get your curriculum satisfied by just redesigning spaces and minimizing the amount of walls that you remove you still have to address the roof you still have to address the mechanical system so you're going to be tearing down ceilings for example to get access to all that mechanical system so you're absolutely right it's not going to be a paint job it's more than a paint job and I don't know what that minimal is but it's that's one end of the part of the reason I mentioned I'm sorry to interrupt you guys part of the reason I mentioned that is if the disruption to the existing building activity is substantial under any circumstance then tearing out a few walls and putting it in a courtyard I mean it may be but it may not actually be as big an issue as you might suggest if under the ordinary no new courtyard scenario you're still tearing out everything out and there are not going to be any kids and staff in that section of the building under any circumstance that's a great observation that what appears to be a huge intervention which is creating that courtyard may actually be relatively minor but we need to consider everything else that needs to be not just to bring the building up to speed we should look at a base repair option which is perhaps just making those modifications that are completely necessary and we'll get a cost for that and a phasing implication that we could then bounce you know here's the courtyard it costs so much more well that doesn't seem that bad does that make sense when I go back to what we're really getting apples to oranges here you were saying if you present something to the public why wouldn't everybody just say if it's feasible impossible to have a building that is a paint job satisfies the program it's half the cost why wouldn't we just do it and it's hard to communicate to the public that there's a quality of education that we're missing out on if we present this as a viable option and I don't think we should be presenting anything well yes and no we do a lot of these studies and typically at the end there is some criteria that just like you were talking about that we evaluate these options against disruption to occupants during construction cost achieves educational objectives you know day light you know it's energy efficient it could be less than 10 and good, better, best or yes, no and then you go through and say the option where we address all the mechanical issues we just close up all the open spaces and adjust the program within the existing footprint ok maybe it meets the educational specifications but you know from an energy standpoint it's still horrible, we still have lots of rooms without daylight you know and that's a deal breaker for the committee so that option was dismissed and it's important to do that because someone will ask just like you did well why didn't you look at that matter of fact we did and it was dismissed and these are the reasons why it was dismissed one of the things that I'm going to do is that if you could show that base case point out the deficiencies in it but also say the disruption to the building would actually already be so significant in any way that you're not saving that much in terms of the disruption to the building you can put words in your mouth you can do the analysis and find out if that's true but if it's true then it would strengthen the case that what's the value at that point it's so disruptive and it's so much work for incremental difference of cost you can make all those things go away and get exactly what you want that's the kind of creation you need to make so one of the questions that you asked is is everything that you're presenting going to be something that MSBA agrees with you one thing that we haven't talked about and that I think maybe being talked about right now is a code upgrade and that's in fact something that you do have to present just that we are up to code now and one that costs to get up to code right so I mean I think that you know I don't know that that's something that we want to look at because in fact some of the baseline things are getting rid of the open classrooms getting the daylight right those are already our minimums so I don't think we need to go there so that's one thing the other is that whatever designs you come up with I didn't look at these with an eye toward it tonight but we have our current enrollment right now and we have ideas about what it might be but this is something that's got to last us at least 50 years and if as demographics do if we go back up and this all of a sudden 10 years from now has to accommodate more kids where do we put them how do we add that on is their flexibility in the design to put it at it in a logical place yeah we do need to include that in the planning as future expansion the potential for futures I'm just going to play Timekeeper for a moment it's 8.20 I don't want to cut off things prematurely I also want to make sure we give you some direction I'm going to scan my list for things we should probably just touch on as many as possible I have two comments one is it okay in the model of the new construction all the new construction you have the special education programs on the second floor would that be okay with the current programs or other programs independent would that be okay to have it on the second floor it would be fully accessible for the accessible okay and if we're treating our special education kids as an integrated model they should be welcome in any part of the building correct so they should be welcome in any part of the building yeah but not just about mobility mobility I'm thinking that in Wildwood there are some issues some kids with mobility issues so getting to the second floor would be more problematic I'm thinking so I don't we don't know if they're going to be stable in Wildwood so this would forbid those kids from being what's the nature of the disability no but you need 100% dependency on the elevator that's what I'm saying there's no ground we think it would have something like this I want to include the ground so that you are not exclusively independent so if there's mechanical failure in the elevator we still have access we can revisit that location that's a beauty to do we can do anything anything more yeah that was one thing that I would say include the ground just for future changes another thing is the demographic change we've seen it in the business right now that sometimes you have cohort where you have four classrooms and I was also wondering how can you accommodate that when you're here there's not much of a flexibility there's no one more room than you could maybe sign again you have four classrooms well that's one of the reasons we try to arrange the classrooms sequentially so that that bubble in the population just moves along that way here but it would be the assumption is it's a bubble not growth the bubble does not grow and you have an efficiency because if you have 21 if you have 40 the point is that it's up some place to be down somewhere else if it's not and it's actually just straight growth then you have a problem that's why we have extension as part of the so given our time we'll like discipline Mr. Chair I would like to move us on but I want to make sure you feel like we've given you a sense of direction for our next meeting you know we've got some stuff we were not able to answer tonight we've commented on these a little bit what more would you be looking for us before you kind of anything that comes to mind after this meeting should be brought back to you so that we can try to as soon as we can start incorporating that into revisions of this final meeting is done so as soon as we get that feedback together well the next topic has the potential for you but being something we could talk about for a long time I think I'm I guess what I almost want to do is kind of leave it for the next time because I'd like to give it a good full hearing and that the next topic is public outreach and we'd actually ask TSKP for a little bit of feedback on how they would want to do that but I think we can easily talk about that for half an hour and an objection I'm going to say let's set this aside can I only mention of the public outreach about press releases I don't think if any of you have seen much traction of the press releases that we have seen it they haven't seen it in my PGO anywhere so I would like to see more if there's a way that we can each conduct our own PGO and ask why it's not out so that there's more outreach I know that you said the issue about the preschools but then it went out I was going to try and get in touch with Diane about that I think she might have access to to apparently there exists in Amherst preschool principals listserv and I'm hoping somebody knows how to access that and is willing to let us know about that so we're going to try to make use of that and I think Diane's our go-to on that and the other place we had hoped to distribute press releases is through our own listserv but I don't think we've done that yet either they're posted on the web they're posted on the web we had advertised that we would send the press releases directly to the emails as well we don't want to do that we could decide we don't want to do that but it is something we said as I said I will send anything to the list but just tell me what to send send the press release why not I thought I had sent an email can you help us from the school committee can you help us disseminate this more sure I need to get back on the agenda for some reason this committee was a regular update in the school committee agendas and I noticed it hasn't been recently Mike hasn't been here I'm staying at the school committee meetings we had a regular standing item where we talked about things that were going on that was committee and updated people and for some reason it's no longer a standing item I'm going to get it to oversight but I've got to get it back on the agenda and that would help basically columns and letters that are written by the school committee it would be nice to get a shout out on those even if they're talking about something else to say and the Fort River School Building Committee is making progress please tune in it might be better to do it more than that oh yeah if not we have to go and make a public comment on the next committee meetings and one of us we want to hijack the conversation but if it's not in the agenda I actually don't agree I think every single school committee meeting should be a standing item where I or the superintendent or somebody comes we actually update the committee and then the public through it on what we're doing at some point it's supposed to be a standing item it's an oversight it's got to drop for some reason I don't know if this is the right terminology we almost should have some sort of joint meeting where the exact appropriate time is I'm not going to claim to quite know at this point but as we're getting closer to the end we have more of a finished product I think we're going to do general public outreach but I think it would be great to I think the question I'd have for the committee but also for you would be is that before or after December holidays because I think my thought in my head based on where we are right now is that either would be before them or after them would be a good time because I also don't want to have a discussion with the school committee about where we're at at the point that everything's so big and so done that we're not really asking for feedback we're just saying here's the almost finished product what do you think of it we need to have a progress report progress meeting and look for feedback so when do you think that would be early December? before the holidays because we have our estimates back by then we're planning to do a general public outreach the weekend the week after Thanksgiving so it would be appropriate to be in that time so let me also talk to the chair of the school committee and try to get a large chunk of an agenda setup for that time period and we'll let you know what the dates are what it makes sense to do it before public outreach forum or after forum forum I think we would have to go to school it's almost kind of courtesy since we are scheduling the thing for after Thanksgiving we should have to schedule the school committee before Thanksgiving that means we have a meeting on November 5 I think the next one after that is two weeks later okay we'll book us so 6th, 13th, 20th probably November 20th that sounds fine that is, which is also why it somehow seems unlikely it's not after Thanksgiving itself it's the Tuesday before Thanksgiving the school committee meetings are open to the public anyway so that will be the first time that the public will be in the broadcasts here the first time the public can attend and will they be allowed to comment it all depends on how we structure the meeting I'm not trying to sound cute we can do that at meetings we don't always I know that sounds vague the school committee will want to talk about it in business it also depends on the purpose of having the school committee meeting is November 27 we're meeting November November 5th and I think November 27 that's after Thanksgiving that was one of the dates we were thinking of so November 27th would be a good date for our meeting with the school committee except I think we were already thinking that might have actually been the day we were thinking we would do the public outreach maybe not a date of our school committee meeting no one's going to come to our school committee meeting hey, no more interesting can we do it on November 5th can we do it on the 5th because we're doing the dual language school vote that meetings well, thank you for your honesty well, I could talk to the chair but I think that's the problem can we invite the school committee to our meeting on the 21st well, that's another we had a meeting on the 21st no, well we do if we're on every other Wednesday I thought we had a sort of minor strike about having our meeting the day before Thanksgiving well, I think you were part of it I was the other day tell me why meeting with the school committee on the 27th is a problem I don't know the other reason it would be problematic is that we were trying to find a time to be available to the general public in that small spot of time between Thanksgiving and the holidays and that was kind of the first week and we could split to the next week but then that would be the absolute end of it our opportunities I think but maybe that's what we do it would be better for us to meet with the school committee and it would give you enough time and then follow with public outreach the week after would be okay done make sure I can get on that they do that tomorrow make sure we can get on that call tomorrow I will send you an e-mail I have one more thing I'm sorry we were huddling earlier about energy or energy meaning sustainability discussion with this committee I agree with that great that will be a workshop with you and we're going to try to get our consultants here as well back to what's left on my calendar here my agenda here there was an e-mail from Jim that came through rather quickly that I didn't get to fully absorb but I believe we have it looked like the solicitation was ready but I don't know that we were prepared to oh sorry Jim did prepare the geotech specs in fact the mysterious papers you found have been left by him elf-like for us to find but none of us realized what they were so those specs look pretty ready to me I paint to figure out who I'm going to send them to but they look solid to me I'll change some formatting if everyone else is fine I'll send them out I assume it's possible they didn't have any and that solves that mystery too yeah and we don't have this or very important yet but I think it's working its way we have a question about the soil warring test the solicitation is going out too that's the one you were talking about that will show water table yes and it will show the nature of the soil right so that's when we'll start to get to know what kind of strategies for foundations foundations and sort of waterproofing and watering we're building a boat that's another way to put it a boat or getting rid of the water or potentially piles yeah whether we're building an island or a boat I have a quick update on committee membership I had a back and forth with the town manager who said that because you didn't get sworn in before the votes the whole process had to be completed according to the rules that have been handed down I don't like this answer but it means you have to wait until December whenever they see the council but I I'm glad you're here tonight I really want you here this is an important time to have your input regardless of the fact that you can't vote you're the only person who's in the school yes sometimes Diane is able to come sometimes Mike is able to come but it's key that we don't go off of the tangent so I think we just need to clarify publicly that we are being allowed to seek a voting member to the committee even though we did everything correct to get him seated and we are being told by the town manager or the select board no town manager his role was the the gatekeeper to the select board that the whole process needed to be complete so I am not happy with that result but it is an answer that I have given it would be awesome if you kept coming anyway because you're in here to be honest with you, unless we have a big argument once the committee your input is more important than your vote we're doing everything like consensus then you can shape the consensus we don't have any invoices to vote on this evening briefly oh yes yes back to item 2 meeting record that's okay it could be difficult to park in town sorry I was just going to give you an opportunity to say hello oh hi nice to meet you this is Laura Bishop thank you and with that can you do anything from us by the way Annunciate more clearly, speak up to whatever we're very good at mumbling at times I guarantee with that I'll entertain a motion to adjourn second all in favor