I was talking to a friend tonight and she said one of those things that makes too much sense. I was explaining the improvements the school district wants. She said, “so they want to spend $20 million on the high school, to add 1 grade?” I said yes. She gave me that look and said, “can’t they build a new school for that?” She has a point.

Then she said something really important. “Why not just rebuild Treasure Mountain Junior High with 7th, 8th, and 9th grade and put 5th and 6th at Ecker Hill? It has to be cheaper and you still get the room to have all day kindergarten in the elementary schools.”

Why didn’t I think of that? Or more importantly, why didn’t the Master Planning Committee think of that?

Right now the plan is to spend about $50 million to add on to the High School, tear down Treasure Mountain, and build a new school at Ecker Hill. What would it cost to rebuild Treasure Mountain for 3 grades? Using national standards, we would take the number of students (about 1200) times 140 square feet per student times $170 per square feet. That gives us a cost of $28 million. Not cheap … but it is half the cost of their current plan.

The school district gets what they say they want with all day kindergarten. The death trap Treasure Mountain International School gets torn down. A new school is built. The number of transitions for students are the same. We keep schools in city. The benefits associated with a centralized Kearns campus are magnified.

Now I’m sure some would say that the real negative with this idea is that it would increase traffic on Kearns. Yet, when the Master planning Committee was talking tonight about adding a school to the Ecker Hill campus, they said traffic was Summit County’s problem to solve. They said that what they were concerned with was education. So, in this case, any traffic issue is Park City Municipal’s issue to solve.

Given that, this almost seems like a no brainer.

I was impressed by the positive atmosphere of the final Park City School District’s Master Planning community meeting on July 21 and the insightful contributions that the many people in attendance made. Many people seem to support the committee and where the plans are headed, and the community still has many ideas that need to be talked through and considered.

During the hour of the meeting designated for comments, many people shared their ideas and concerns with passion, respect, and insight. Some excellent points were made. A few of the community concerns included transportation, walking back and forth between the high school and the sports facilities on the east side of the campus, and costs.

One of the underlying themes of the meeting was separating our wants from our needs. The problem is that we still don’t quite know what our wants and needs are. Some community members argued against the extra costs of an indoor field house, while others pleaded not to let sports and the arts be considered a lower priority.

The many comments and ideas the community had regarding the plans go to show that we may need to slow down the planning process. There are still many things to consider when it comes to the Kearns campus in particular, and I think it’s important that we really think through all the options we still have. I think the positive contributions made at the meeting are an excellent stepping stone to drafting the best possible plan for our district.

I live blogged tonight’s School Board Master Planning Committee Meeting. We are within about a week of the Master Planning Committee making a recommendation to the school board on what changes to make in our districts.

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Occam’s razor effectively states, “when you have two competing theories that make exactly the same predictions, the simpler one is the better.” It’s a great way to look at things because I think most of us would agree a less complex solution has a better chance of success.

Over that past year, the Park City School District has formed a Master Planning Committee to look at the future needs of our schools. This started out by looking whether Treasure Mountain Junior High should be rebuilt. It then morphed into grade realignment. Then it morphed into a complete rebuilding of the Kearns Campus, that included moving Treasure Mountain to Ecker Hill (or Bear Hollow). Then it morphed into adding all sorts of sports facilities.

Let’s first start by disregarding all the changes to the Kearns campus. Those in effect were driven by the “decision” to make the other changes. This is how it went… If we are going to have grade realignment and add all day kindergarten to our schools we have to move the 5th graders out of our elementary schools because there isn’t room. If the 5th grade gets moved out then they have to go somewhere and it makes sense to put them with 6th graders. If we put the 5th and 6th graders together, it makes sense to have the 7th and 8th graders together. If that happens, it doesn’t make sense to have the 9th graders in a building by themselves so the high school will have to expand to accommodate 9th grade. If we are going to expand the high school, we need to move Dosier Field. If we are going to move Dosier Field, let’s make an athletic part of the campus on the east side. If we are going to make an athletic area of the campus, let’s have a field house. And so on…

Let’s go back to why we needed to expand the high school; grade realignment. So, why do we need grade realignment? School Superintendent Dr. Ember Conley announced that we needed this because only 9% of our 1th grade Hispanic student were competent in English according to SAGE test results. She said that research shows that if you can get these Hispanic kids into all day kindergarten, they will be on par with other students by 2nd grade.

So we need all day Kindergarten to positively impact this population group. Dr. Conley then announced this would need to trigger grade realignment because there wasn’t space in our elementary schools for all day kindergarten. So, this triggers a cascading effect of changes that leads to a $50-$100 million bond to rebuild the entire district. You keep K-4 in the elementary schools. You build a 5/6 school. You have a 7/8 school. You add on to the high school for 9th grade. Since you are doing that, you make the Kearns campus everything everyone may ever want.

What interesting is to back up and look at the root issue. The root issue is adding all day kindergarten to our existing elementary schools. If you take each school individually, I would tend to agree with Dr Conley that there is no space to add full day kindergarten to some of our schools. Yet, what about Jeremy Ranch? They currently have 594 students and have a capacity of 708 (functional capacity of 673). It looks like you could add full day kindergarten classes from at least two schools (30 students in each class) there and still have a little room. What about McPolin? They have 407 students currently and have a capacity of 563 (functional capacity of 535). It looks like you could add 3, 30 student kindergartens to this school.

So, it appears while there may not be room in some of our individual schools to house a full day kindergarten, there likely is plenty of room district wide. What does that mean? We’d need to adjust district boundaries (or incent some students to attend other schools) to even out the number of students. I know that’s probably not a welcome topic in some circles, but neither is putting kids in mobile homes for a year while building happens, having a year without a stadium (as dosier field is rebuilt), or spending $50 million dollars.

There is also the argument that growth is coming and we need to account for that. Actual estimates for student growth by the school district are between a drop of 0.3% and an increase of 2%. The middle range is growth of 1.1%. Changing boundaries would likely more than account for that too.

Now back to Occams’ Razor. To achieve the goal of full day kindergarten and account for a little growth what is the better alternative?

• Make elementary schools Pre-K to 4th, build a 5/6 school at Ecker, tear down Treasure Mountain Junior High, add on to the high school, move the football field, add all sorts of athletic facilities, and spend $50 million.
• OR Change school boundaries so that we even out the population at our schools.

If we take the second option, then 5th grade doesn’t get forced out of our elementary schools. Our 6th and 7th grades can stay at Ecker. Our 8th and 9th grades could stay at treasure Mountain (we could still decide to rebuild that). Our High School would stay 10th-12th and no additions would need to take place.

Then later, if a real issue arises that requires a massive rebuilding effort, we’d still have space and money to do it.

I think the simplest solution, and the one that makes the most sense, is likely to just move the boundaries.

The heckling started early during last night’s School Board Master Planning regarding rebuilding/moving our schools. A person from the audience interrupted the meeting by shouting something about how the school’s plans would never work. Rory Murphy, co-chair of the School District Master Planning Committee, took it in stride, saying “OK. OK. Thanks for that.” He then continued forward.

During so many government meetings, the audience is chastised and told to be quiet, not clap for ideas they support, and not to “intimidate others” by showing support for something they like. Yet, Mr Murphy let it all happen… and to everyone’s benefit. He embraced the cheers from people who said that Treasure Mountain Junior High should be torn down. He welcomed the applause from people who said that the district had over reached and made too grand a plan. He was fine when people yelled in support of building a field house .

What he allowed to happen was truly a town hall, where passion was expressed and people truly felt part of something. What Mr Murphy did was trust in the people. He didn’t feel the need to control the situation and was rewarded with a great exchange of ideas from all sides.

It was the type of meeting that people will come back to because it was both interesting and fun. In fact, this type of meeting is what we need more of, if we want the public to provide input. In other meetings where the public is told to behave like a page out of Father Knows Best, it often seems like the chairperson is afraid of what the public may say.

In this case, Mr Murphy showed us that if you have a little faith in the people, they just may surprise you.

Tonight we are at the School District’s public meeting related to rebuilding its Kearns Campus and moving Treasure Mountain to Ecker Hill. The connection is a little spotty, so I’ll do my best to keep up.

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