The new middle school planned for a site on T.C. Walker Road will not include a full-size gymnasium, it was determined during a lengthy joint meeting between the Gloucester School Board and county supervisors Saturday.
The new campus will replace Page Middle School, which was demolished after it was severely damaged by a tornado in April 2011. Most of the discussion during the first four hours of the meeting related to the new school, and was guided by six questions posed by supervisor Andy James. One question asked what would be involved with including a full-size gym.
It was a question the school board had answered before, and the response has always been $2 million more. School board chairman Randy Burak said the school board had initially sought $32 million for the new school, which included $8 million in Page insurance proceeds. Supervisors voted to allocate only $18 million for the project, leaving the school division with a $26 million budget for the school.
“The things the community really wanted were excluded,” said supervisors’ vice chairman JJ Orth. He said a full-size gym and auditorium were among those things. “The money was not there,” school board member Ann Burruss responded, adding that a lot of the things that were initially planned for the school were cut due to budget constraints.
“It’s your decision whether you want a full-size gym,” supervisor Carter Borden told the school board. “We’re designing within our budget. You are the one who said not a penny more,” school board member Kim Hensley replied.
Supervisors’ chairman Louise Theberge supported Hensley’s response. “When we set the budget at $26 million, we knew that a full-size gym would cost $2 million more. No one was willing to step up and say we’ll give you more. And that was in the fall.”
James said he would favor trying to find the money to build the full-size gym. School division superintendent Ben Kiser said, with construction documents 35 percent complete, planners needed to know immediately if the gym would be funded.
“If there is a decision from four of you to do that, we need to know yesterday. If we’re going to put a full-size gymnasium in, we can’t talk about this for six months,” Kiser said. No other supervisors expressed support for added funding.
The new school will have a gymnasium but not room for spectator seating, which will preclude its use for competitive basketball. “The trend is to get away from competitive middle school sports. In recent years, that has been accelerated by budget constraints,” Kiser said.
Other questions James put to the school officials involved early planning for the school, community involvement, and the choice of architects and design. Orth said he would like to have seen more community and teacher involvement, along with public hearings. “I wish that we had two years to go from concept to design,” said Burruss. “We were moving forward; we needed to have a middle school.”
Burak said the design firm was chosen through the usual county procurement process. Four initial designs were provided by the chosen firm, and were reviewed by Kiser, his two assistant superintendents and school division construction manager Scott Shorland.
Kiser said they selected the design they felt best accommodated the educational specifications developed by an early planning committee of teachers, administrators, supervisors and school board members. He said the selected design was then submitted to his board, which approved the recommendation.
“We expect them to do their job and come up with what they think is the best plan,” school board member Anita Parker said of allowing the division administrators to evaluate the designs. She said if board members had disagreed with the choice, they would have said so.
James also questioned the need for a “state-of-the-art” school. Burak said every new school is generally considered a state-of-the-art school, with contemporary design and furnishings. He said Peasley Middle School was considered state-of-the-art when it was built. “We don’t want to go back to 1950. We are in the 21st century and we have to look ahead,” Burruss said.
Board member Carla Hook said the design for the school, which includes several open spaces, was not like the original design for Gloucester High School with its wide, open classroom doorways. “It has traditional classrooms and collaborative spaces,” she said of the middle school plan.
Kiser said hallways are a waste of space and explained that collaborative was another word for working together—something his teachers already practice. “We’re not redesigning the wheel, we’re building a better wheel,” he said of the building plan.
The boards also briefly discussed the county utility director’s opinion that the school board needed to run water and sewer lines serving the new school the entire half-mile length of the site’s T.C. Walker Road frontage. The school is being constructed in the corner of the 133-acre site closest to Route 17 and T.C. Walker Road.
County administrator Brenda Garton suggested she and her staff be allowed to do more research into the matter before requiring the installment of empty, unused pipe at a taxpayer cost of $200,000 or more.
During the supervisors’ meeting Tuesday night, Garton said the utility director would only require the school division to extend the lines from Route 17 to the point of the new school connection. She said the project does not fall under the more stringent requirements of the subdivision ordinance. The school board will be required to grant the county a utility easement along the T.C. Walker Road frontage.
Another topic on the joint meeting agenda was the use of the former middle school site on Route 17, which still holds the school division’s transportation center. The boards agreed to revisit past proposals for a joint county/schools transportation center, and look into its potential location before further discussing use of the site.
A third topic, the T.C. Walker Education Center, was also tabled. The school board plans to relocate its offices to the center, freeing space for county government offices. School officials have design plans for renovating the Walker facility, but bids on the project were not due until this week.
The Walker Center will likely soon be addressed by the boards, as base bids on the project ranged from $2.421 million to $2.877 million when they came in Tuesday. Supervisors had said previously they were willing to dedicate $1 million to the work.