The size of the campuses won't be shrinking anytime soon, but Clark County School Board members said Thursday that future designs should at least feel smaller.
"If you're going to build big schools, look at creating a small-school atmosphere," School Board President Larry Mason told the district's facilities and construction administrators. "There has to be a way to pull it off."
Clark County has some of the largest campus enrollment numbers in the nation, with elementary schools regularly serving more than 800 students, middle schools over-capacity with 1,300 students and high schools topping out at over 3,500.
The School Board voted unanimously to begin the process of designing the next generation of prototypes, which would ideally incorporate energy and environmental conservation as well as increased safety and security measures.
But School Board members also told district staff not to move beyond the early design stages, such as choosing possible architectural partners, until the 2005 Legislature completes its work.
Lawmakers are expected to consider a variety of educational initiatives, such as class size reduction demands and potential funding for full-day kindergarten. Both proposals could drastically affect the district's classroom capacity, said Dale Scheideman, director of planning and engineering for the district.
Architects will be encouraged to submit designs that emphasize flexibility, Scheideman said, with more common space areas and classrooms that could be expanded or divided as needed.
Many of the expensive restrictions that hampered the design process in the past have been lifted by the state's adoption of new building codes, Scheideman said. The changes to the building code could shave as much as $500,000 off the cost of building a new middle school, Scheideman said.
Skip Rapoport, a parent who served on a district committee studying the feasibility of smaller schools, told the School Board it was "an exercise in futility."
With the district adding 12,000 to 15,000 students annually, larger campuses are an economic necessity, Rapoport said.
"How do we keep up with growth and talk about building smaller schools?" Rapoport asked. "And smaller campuses is only a piece of the equation. It's not going to make much of a difference to students unless the class sizes become smaller as well."
The district, which has opened at least 10 new schools in each of the past five years, adopted prototypes as a way of saving on design fees and benefitting from bulk orders of construction supplies.
The prototypes were also supposed to cut down on requests for costly change orders. But several School Board members said Thursday they weren't satisfied that their directive to that effect was being followed.
A request to approve $248,075 in change orders initially failed Thursday on a 3-3 vote, but passed the second time around after School Board members were told that because the work had already been completed they were already obligated.
"We have a liability to pass these bills," said Walt Rulffes, deputy superintendent of operations for the district.
That explanation didn't sit well with Mason.
"Time and time again, this has happened," Mason said. "We've asked you to come to us first (before initiating change orders). You've put us in a situation where if we vote against it, we're liable? That's unacceptable."
School Board member Sheila Moulton concurred, and asked that district staff come back at a later date for a deeper discussion of the change order process.
"We have a responsibility to look at how we're monitoring and if the policy isn't being met, we have to ask why," Moulton said.
Join the Discussion:
Check this out for a full explanation of our conversion to the LiveFyre commenting system and instructions on how to sign up for an account.
Full comments policy