Group Seeks To Have Input Before New High School Is Constructed
Public, School Board, City Council Invited
A group of citizens will meet Sunday at 3:00 in the hopes of “putting the brakes” on the construction of a new high school until a consensus is reached on its design.
Parents Excited About Commerce Education will meet at the First Baptist Church of Commerce’s Family Fellowship Center. It seeks attendance by the public, but also by the Commerce City Council and Commerce Board of Education.
PEACE has no officers, but Dr. Clark Hill has found himself cast in the role of one of its spokesmen.
“We want to get everybody on the same page,” said Hill. “Let’s not build a school with everything if we have to halfway do it. My concern is we’re not looking at all our options. We want the city council to come, we want the school board to come, we want everybody. We’re not trying to organize an effort against the school board, we’re organizing an effort for the kids.”
Concern about the school design arose when the school system’s architects, Robertson Loia Roof, presented drawings at a public meeting March 31. The first criticisms came about because a revised construction plan would leave the school without a gym for up to two years. Since then, however, people began to question other aspects of the plan.
Those range from the “footprint” of the building to the size of the proposed performing arts center to the location and number (not shown on the plans) of retention ponds to concerns about failure to consider energy efficiency and “green” technology in the new school.
“We want to educate the public as to what’s happening, what the concerns are and what the problems are,” said Hill.
Hill believes that the meeting two weeks ago should have happened six months earlier and that parental and other concerns should have been taken into account before a final plan was offered.
“The point is, there are a lot of questions, and they have to sell it to the public,” stated Hill, who said failure to get a consensus would have “catastrophic” consequences in community support for the project.
He also says there is no reason for the board of education to be in a hurry.
“If we have to wait another year to get the right school, that’s fine,” Hill said. “What people want to see is that their concerns are met.”
At the root of the concern, say Hill and others, is that the school board provided no public input into the design. While the board did get a committee together early on to present a “wish list” of amenities important to a new school, it never reconvened the group to discuss or prioritize those needs.
The architectural firm has also drawn criticism, particularly when its representative could not give specific details at the March 31 presentation.
“From our viewpoint, they don’t know the answers to a lot of the questions yet,” said member Keith Massey, referring to both the Commerce Board of Education and the project’s architects. “They are going to proceed and maybe take care of those questions as they come to them. For example, in the gym situation, when people asked, they didn’t have a plan, but they said they would work around it.
“We don’t think that enough options had been looked at, and enough consideration give to future expansion. One case in point is the auditorium. There is no possibility of it being expanded if it is incorporated into the school building as it is (on the plans) right now.”
Gym Compromise
Members of the group say they’ve heard that the “compromise” for the gym conundrum is the construction of a gym in a metal building on the back side of the campus.
Superintendent of Schools James E. “Mac” McCoy promised last week that a “compromise” that would satisfy all complaints was imminent.
Not if it’s a steel building.
“We just don’t think there’s any place for a Butler building on the campus of the new school,” said Massey. “We’ve got one, the field house, which is ugly.”
Such plain box-type buildings - like the primary school gym - “don’t reflect permanency of any kind,” Massey added. “They look like a trailer and suggest a temporary situation.”
Hill agreed: “Nobody wants a Butler building,” he stated.
Hill believes more effort should be spent determining what the citizens want, after which the community can decide what it can afford.
“The main concern is the academic center. Let’s get that, then tell us what else (among the priorities) we can afford,” he says. “We may have to build the academic center and then come back with another bond in two or three years... The public wants us to have the best school we can have. If it takes another bond issue, so be it.”
