By Diane Petryk
LEWISBURG — Not so fast, some taxpayers said, so the Lewisburg Area School District has decided to put three more months into developing a building plan.
The extension was recommended by Superintendent Mark DiRocco and approved unanimously by the school board Thursday.
Earlier, the board had planned to approve a master facilities plan by February. The target date now is May.
The district is facing projections of higher enrollments at all grade levels, and in a number of ways, its already crowded 80-year-old high school falls short of meeting students’ needs.
The school board recently hired a consultant to study the four school buildings and come up with a variety of building solutions from which the directors can pick and choose.
A public meeting held Oct. 27 to discuss the consultant’s first offering of 11 possible scenarios, including renovations and new construction, seemed to reveal an overwhelming sentiment for building a new high school. But some parents came away from that session complaining the deck was stacked.
Sam Pearson, a mother of two young children in the school system, said there are viable alternatives that were not considered and the meeting was not designed to hear options other than the ones brought in by the consultant.
Parent Jordi Comas said the consultant sought opinions for a variety of elements, such as school size, but the public was not given the pedagogical research to make informed preferences.
He said Monday that the time extension is a good idea if it brings a broader range of information before the people, not just more time to consider the same options.
DiRocco said Monday he asked for the extension because a number of parents came forward to say they could think of scenarios that were not on the table.
“We wanted to make sure it’s an open process,” he said.
The consultant, DeJong, of Ohio, still is scheduled to present a narrowed list of options to the school board Dec. 3. On Dec. 9, the facilities committee will review the options and plan more community input sessions.
The first of these will be held Jan. 19 at the high school, beginning at 7 p.m. It will be considered Community Input Session No. 3. The facilities committee will review opinions, and the school district will prepare “Stakeholder Review” posters to be displayed at the Donald H. Eichhorn Middle School from Feb. 5-26.
During this period, the community is invited to submit written comments, and the facilities committee will discuss them on March 3.
On March 16, Community Input Session No. 4 will be held. The facilities committee will make its recommendation to the school board on April 8, and a public hearing on those recommendations will take place April 22.
This schedule is subject to change pending the progress of the planning process, DiRocco said. But if it is not changed, the board will discuss the plan and take further public comment on May 13.
Then a proposed master facilities plan will be posted at the middle school from May 17-27. The school board will set a date for voting on the plan at its May 28 meeting.
Comas said he would like to see the public engaged in the process of collecting information in an open-ended manner.
The community, he said, should ask itself what it wants. Is it low cost? Educational quality? Or is it athletic fields near the school?
“The process should be to talk about why we want certain things,” he said.
He said he does not want a planning process that encourages more sprawl and with the mind set that if it’s old, it has to be tossed out.
He also said he’d like to see policy in the planning, so that people know if they are a community organization, whether they would be welcome to use the school facility outside school hours, for instance.
While DiRocco said, “I think it’s important we take our time and get this right,” he added: “It’s also essential we make a decision in a reasonable amount of time. It can’t take years if these enrollment projections are correct.”
