Tuesday Night Fish Fry!*

The meeting began at 7:00. After a greeting by Board Chair John Parola, and introductions of the Board and the architects, there were presentations by the Superintendent, and then by Joe Hemes and Steven Blatt (the architects). Then there were questions from the audience, with the whole thing breaking up about 8:30.

There were 12 Board members present, and about 40 attendees; of these approximately a third were staff. As one wag put it, there were about as many attending as the number of ads that the District had published -- one for one!

What follows is not a comprehensive account of the entire meeting. If the District wishes to put out such an account they are welcome to, and they have the ability. I'll record here the parts of the meeting that got my attention.

• The Superintendent and Board Chair have a meeting next Tuesday at the Department of Education with the DOE's construction team. They'll present a first draft of the project budget then.
• The pond off the southwest corner of the building is a built pond to handle storm water and drainage.
• The academic wings have been "splayed" to maximize natural lighting.
• The proposed building is approximately 125,000 square feet.
• They're proposing a wood-chip boiler, with oil back-up. It probably will cost about $840,000 all told, with a "payback" of about 10 years. It was stated the the wood-chip boiler is projected to save about $80,000 per year, compared with an oil-burning system. No cost figures could be provided for what an all-oil system would cost.
• One question from the audience concerned the roof design. That which formerly was referred to as "inward sloping" was now called "shallow pitch." Here at Voters, we've made an editorial decision to refer to it as the "inward-sloping shallow-pitch center-drain bathtub-style" roof! The roof will be a "cold roof," because of being well-insulated; indeed the building design as a whole aims for energy efficiency. Yet the design uses escaping heat around the drains to keep them from freezing up. It's an amazing world we live in!
• The pole barn for the landowner will cost $30,000. If the earlier plan continues to hold, then that's $30,000 for materials, with labor supplied by students in the Building Trades program at the Tech Center. This brings the current figure for local costs to $172,000, with $142,000 in land acquisition costs additional to those funded by the State.
  
• Another question was about operations costs for the new school, compared to those of the six facilities it replaces. The Superintendent acknowledged that some preliminary and admittedly rough numbers point to operational costs being about $21,000 a year less.
• Another question referred to the disposition of the local money spent to date: How will the reimbursement by the state of these monies be handled? (Our readers will remember our discussion of this issue here and here.) The Superintendent said that this would be a matter of discussion at the Tuesday meeting mentioned above. He later returned to this question, asserting that these funds will be used to "offset educational costs."

If you were at the meeting and want to add something, feel free to; if so, you might be wise to be someone other than "anonymous."

* Though it was an exciting evening, of course it can't really compare to a Saturday Night Fish Fry!