District gets a feel for what public wants

Franklin - Franklin Public School District residents were asked Monday night to provide input about future facilities' needs.

About 70 residents and district staff attended an information-gathering meeting, held in the Green Room of Franklin High School, on how best to meet the needs of a growing student body - including new construction.

Superintendent Steve Patz said resident input was critical so the School Board and administration will know what steps to take to meet a growing enrollment and address the district's aging and instructionally inadequate buildings.

"It's important that we get all the information we can," he said. "The intent is just to share ideas on what you're thinking."

Years in the making

Patz said that the district has been grappling with space issues since at least 2005, when the board determined that sixth-grade students' academic and extracurricular needs would be better served if they attended the middle school, which like Franklin High School is cramped.

Since then, he said the district formed a long-range planning committee, advanced a building referendum that failed and conducted community surveys in an attempt to gauge residents' opinion on how to proceed with building needs in the future.

Just this year, Patz said, the district received a report from the University of Wisconsin's Applied Population Laboratory that indicated enrollment would continue to increase - from an anticipated 4,315 students next school year to 4,863 a decade later.

Construction? Maybe

Because new construction is an option, Patz said the district has retained a construction manager, C.G. Schmidt, and Eppstein Uhen Architects, to help the administration evaluate space needs. However, there's no foregone conclusion that the district will embark on a building referendum.

"At this point in time, there are no plans, there are no dollar amounts on anything," he said.

If, indeed, new construction was called for, Patz said a referendum would not be held until November.

"We are not looking for something that will be a resolution next year," he said.

Measuring capacity

However, Eppstein Uhen architect Bob Vajgrt stressed that current learning space at both the high school and Franklin Park Middle School is inadequate to support the curriculum of the future.

If assessing space needs on a square-foot-per-student basis, Vajgrt said both schools are at or over capacity now. Forest Park has 682 students and its capacity is 721; the high school's enrollment is 1,433 and its capacity is 1,294.

And Patz asked residents, when discussing space needs, to consider athletic and academic building needs, as well as what the community at large may require from its schools.

For instance, he said, 565 students are involved in fine arts activities and 1,294 participate in sports. In the 2009-10 school year, Patz said 12,837 residents participated in recreational activities.

The informational meeting was one of two workshops scheduled to gather public input. The second will be held from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. March 19 in the middle school cafeteria, when preliminary solutions will be discussed.