FAQ

A: The plan to construct/reimagine 13 elementary schools designed to serve approximately 600 students would provide for optimal class sizes, allow students with special needs or ELL students a more likely chance to attend their neighborhood school, support the needs of staff, and create community hubs which don’t currently exist and which could serve as neighborhood anchors with spaces available to the public outside of school hours.  

The plan allows for digital instruction capabilities that do not currently exist in our schools and flexibility of space that aligns with 21^st century learning and teaching.

A: Construction on the first new school will likely not begin earlier than 2020. It would likely take approximately 18-24 months for planning and construction of one school, therefore, a plan involving construction of a number of schools would be a 15- to 20-year journey. A school would not be closed until after all impacted students and staff were relocated to their new school.

A: It would be preferred that any new facilities would be built on existing sites.

A: We appreciate historical/unique architectural elements of existing structures and would be open to investigating options to incorporate those elements into new infrastructure.

A: Our desire is to use SAVE funds in which case there would be no additional cost to the community.

A: The first elementary school project (including community conversations, facility design, and construction) would begin in the year 2020, with a new elementary school project occurring each year afterward over the course of 15-20 years.

A: While retrofitted infrastructure would allow for ADA compliance and improvement in facilities in areas such as a secure front entrance; modernized heating, cooling, and ventilation; and improved library spaces. Keeping smaller schools does not address challenges such as significant variance in class sizes across the district, grade level sharing of students, special education or English Learners attending their neighborhood school, and sharing of specials teachers. It also does not create operational savings that can be reinvested back in schools.

A: While it may seem counter intuitive, as schools increase in size, it’s more likely that class sizes decrease or, at minimum, are stabilized across the district. The current iteration of the plan-in-progress—to construct larger, modernized elementary schools and decrease the current inventory—would provide the opportunity to even out class sizes in our elementary schools and reach a more optimal student/teacher ratio.

A: Yes! CRCSD analyzed the current operating costs of 21 elementary buildings and compared these costs to operating fewer elementary buildings. The Committee’s current plan-in-progress amounts to a $2.9 million annual “savings.” This “savings” would, in fact, be utilized as a re-investment in our schools to improve educational programming and student and staff experiences.

A: We have an aging inventory which requires us to strategically and boldly re-imagine how to re-invest in our infrastructure. The committee has used belief statements to guide the work to provide future ready learning environments for our students and staff, and more recently to think of community hubs throughout the community that could be used for a variety of purposes while school is not in session. We are also considering a new fiscal approach to addressing facility and operating costs, and aim to provide opportunity to achieve optimal class sizes.

A: We are in an era of diminishing public resources needed to operate our facilities. This is a reality facing school districts nationwide. Diminishing public resources, the age of our facilities, and the costs associated with operating aging facilities were three factors which initiated a re-examination of our facilities and necessitated a formation of a Facilities Master Plan. Like many school districts throughout the decades, CRCSD has generally relied on various approaches to maintaining facilities which included construction of additions to aging inventory, frequent repairs to outdated systems and infrastructure, and costly updates to aged facilities to meet ADA compliance.

These approaches are costly due, in part, to the age of our facilities. Maintenance and repair costs now equal or exceed 75% of the cost of building completely new facilities in 18 of our 21 elementary buildings. Consideration for replacing an “old” building with a new structure begins when maintenance and repair costs exceed 50% of building new. 

While economic factors initiated the conversation regarding a re-examination of our facilities, as we adopted a new proactive academic vision of Every Learner: Future Ready, it became important to CRCSD and the FMP Committee that we consider how we may use a fiscally imperative adjustment to facilities to also re-imagine how we could proactively and strategically design sustainable infrastructure that would lead to optimal academic experiences for our students and staff.

A: A large committee consisting of community members and district officials spent 15 months developing the plan, guided be research and analysis. They presented the plan to the Board in 2017 and it was approved by the Board in 2018.