Friday, October 9, 2015

Templeton Residents Mull School

Templeton Residents Mull School
No major roadblocks thrown up at public forum
 

School Features
Larger classrooms
Library
Cafetorium
Music and art rooms
A therapy room
An elevator
Handicapped- accessible restrooms
 A gym
Tara Vocino
News Correspondent

TEMPLETON  Questions raised in a public forum regarding the building of a new Templeton Ele­mentary School didn’t raise any red flags Wednesday night at Narragansett Regional High School, according to school officials and engineers guiding the project.

Interim Superintendent Dr. Stephen Hemman said the comments seemed “generally in favor of building a new school,” and he hopes that’s a signal that it will be approved.

The proposed project would replace the existing Templeton Center Elementary School and Baldwinville Elementary School with a new school that serves pre K to grade 5.

Engineers and architects presented a slideshow with an hourlong update of where the project stands now, followed by a 20-minute question-and-answer session. They showed aerial and bird’s-eye views of different parts of the building.

Fifty-six attendees, mostly parents with children 5 and under, and School Building Committee members, were present.

For Bonnie Mahoney, whose daughter Gwendolyn will attend the 5th grade there if it passes, her question was about making South Road a one-way street. Ms. Mahoney lives in Templeton Center.

“I understand the need for a one-way on South Road, but it seems to be going in the wrong direction,” Ms. Mahoney said.

But interim Superintendent Dr. Stephen Hemman assured her that public safety officials recommended the one-way to be headed in the north direction. Wellington Road would run one way in the south direction. Parent and bus drop-off and pick-up would be at South and Wellington roads.

“We met with the Department of Public Works, police, and fire, and they recommended that’s the safest way,” Mr. Hemman told the audience. “If you take a look at the nearby Country Store, there’s two-way traffic, and that’s a concern.”

Jonathan Winikur of project management firm Colliers International also addressed her question.

“It’s your choice,” Mr. Winikur said. “But that’s the recommendation from your public safety officials in town.”

Parent Nathan Beauvais asked about classroom size.


School Features
Larger classrooms
Library
Cafetorium
Music and art rooms
A therapy room
An elevator
Handicapped- accessible restrooms
 A gym


Educational Facility Planner Phillip J. Poinelli replied the new space would be 900 square feet per classroom, which is larger than the current classroom size and meets the Massachusetts School Building Authority requirement for school activities.

The MSBA is an independent public authority that administers and funds a program for grants to eligible cities, towns and regional school districts for school construction and renovation projects.

Mr. Winikur, Mr. Poinelli, and other representatives said the MSBA will fund 63.11 percent of eligible project costs for an approved project, if accepted by the voters of Templeton. That leaves the potential reimbursement to be $22.7 million and the potential net project costs at $24.8 million.

Mr. Winikur explained that Templeton was one of the first districts selected into the eligibility phase in 2007.

“The existing Center Elementary School was grandfathered because of age (built in 1941),” Mr. Winikur said. “MSBA spent a lot of time there and deemed it unsuitable. All engineering systems are in need of replacement.”

And the existing Baldwinville Elementary School is even older, built in 1925.

“There’s no library in either school,” Mr. Poinelli said. “The acoustics in the gym are outrageously bad. The plumbing system is well beyond its use.

With the existing educational configuration, there are four schools. Prekindergarten attends school in Phillipston; grades kindergarten and 1 go to Templeton Center; grades 2 to 4 are at Baldwinville Elementary School and the 5th grade goes to the middle school.

But if the new educational configuration goes through, it will be consolidated into one pre-K to grade 5 elementary school.

Special education students will also have integrated teaching spaces and special teaching areas. There will be a library and a gym, state-of-the art music and art rooms, an elevator, and handicapped-accessible bathrooms, which the current schools don’t have. There will be LED lighting, wireless access throughout the building and grounds, video surveillance, an intrusion detection system and a cafetorium. There will also be a lobby with a seating area, as well as a physical and occupational therapy room.

“We feel we have an overall good contemporary floor plan to bring the kids together,” Mr. Poinelli said.

To pay for the school, Templeton would require a Proposition 2 1/2 debt exclusion tax override, which would need two approvals, both at the Nov. 9 Town Meeting and the Dec. 8 ballot vote, to pass.

Detail design work would be done from January to October 2016. Construction would last from October to June 2018. It would be a 93,000-square-foot school that would serve 580 students.


14 comments:

  1. In my opinion the town's people wanted their neighborhood schools and that is why they rejected the Elementary School that was proposed fifteen years ago. Perhaps our money would be better spent fixing what we have until we can afford a new school in a better location in about ten years. Ten years should be enough time for town residents to learn more about compulsory education and how it has changed our society. Here is an example.

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  2. The Cult Of Forced Schooling

    The most candid account of the changeover from old-style American free market
    schooling to the laboratory variety we have under the close eye of society's managers is a
    book long out of print. But the author was famous enough in his day that a yearly lecture
    at Harvard is named after him, so with a bit of effort on your part, and perhaps a kind
    word to your local librarian, in due time you should be able to find a hair-raising account
    of the school transformation written by one of the insiders. The book in question bears
    the soporific title Principles of Secondary Education. Published in 1918 near the end of
    the great school revolution, Principles offers a unique account of the project written
    through the eyes of an important revolutionary. Any lingering doubts you may have about
    the purposes of government schooling should be put to rest by Alexander Inglis. The
    principal purpose of the vast enterprise was to place control of the new social and
    economic machinery out of reach of the mob. 2

    The great social engineers were confronted by the formidable challenge of working their
    magic in a democracy, least efficient and most unpredictable of political forms. School
    was designed to neutralize as much as possible any risk of being blind-sided by the
    democratic will. Nelson W. Aldrich Jr., writing of his grandfather Senator Aldrich, one of
    the principal architects of the Federal Reserve System which had come into being while



    Inglis' cohort built the schools — and whose intent was much the same, to remove
    economic machinery from public interference — caught the attitude of the builders
    perfectly in his book Old Money . Grandfather, he writes, believed that history, evolution,
    and a saving grace found their best advocates in him and in men like him, in his family
    and in families like his, down to the close of time. But the price of his privilege, the
    senator knew, "was vigilance — vigilance, above all, against the resentment of those who
    never could emerge." Once in Paris, Senator Aldrich saw two men "of the middle or
    lower class," as he described them, drinking absinthe in a cafe. That evening back at his
    hotel he wrote these words: "As I looked upon their dull wild stupor I wondered what
    dreams were evolved from the depths of the bitter glass. Multiply that scene and you have
    the possibility of the wildest revolution or the most terrible outrages."

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  3. Alexander Inglis, author of Principles of Secondary Education, was of Aldrich's class.
    He wrote that the new schools were being expressly created to serve a command
    economy and command society, one in which the controlling coalition would be drawn
    from important institutional stakeholders in the future. According to Inglis, the first
    function of schooling is adjustive, establishing fixed habits of reaction to authority. This
    prepares the young to accept whatever management dictates when they are grown.
    Second is the diagnostic function. School determines each student's "proper" social role,
    logging it mathematically on cumulative records to justify the next function, sorting .
    Individuals are to be trained only so far as their likely destination in the social machine,
    not one step beyond. Conformity is the fourth function. Kids are to be made alike, not
    from any passion for egalitarianism, but so future behavior will be predictable, in service
    to market and political research. Next is the hygienic function. This has nothing to do
    with individual health, only the health of the "race." This is polite code for saying that
    school should accelerate Darwinian natural selection by tagging the unfit so clearly they
    drop from the reproduction sweepstakes. And last is the propaedutic function, a fancy
    word meaning that a small fraction of kids will slowly be trained to take over
    management of the system, guardians of a population deliberately dumbed down and
    rendered childlike in order that government and economic life can be managed with a
    minimum of hassle. And there you have the formula: adjustment, diagnosis, sorting,
    conformity, racial hygiene, and continuity. This is the man for whom an honor lecture in
    education at Harvard is named. According to James Bryant Conant, another progressive
    aristocrat from whom I first learned of Inglis in a perfectly frightening book called The
    Child, The Parent, and the State (1949), the school transformation had been ordered by
    "certain industrialists and the innovative who were altering the nature of the industrial
    process."

    Conant is a school name that resonates through the central third of the twentieth century.
    He was president of Harvard from 1933 to 1953. His book The American High School
    Today (1959), was one of the important springs that pushed secondary schools to gigantic
    size in the 1960s and forced consolidation of many small school districts into larger ones.
    He began his career as a poison gas specialist in WWI, a task assigned only to young men
    whose family lineage could be trusted. Other notable way stations on his path being that
    of an inner circle executive in the top secret atomic bomb project during WWII, and a

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  4. Bart and I road past Templeton Center yesterday, and saw a class room size group of kids and their teacher, behind the school playing a game. The day was so beautiful and I imagine they were having a good time. I said to Bart.," They will never do that again, if they build that new school."

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  5. Please think people. The average cost of an Elementary school in zone 1 (New England) was $306 per sqft. That works out to $50,700 or so per student.
    Why is Templeton being asked to pay $511 a sqft and about $82,000 per student. The average elementary school building allows for 130 sqft per student. The Templeton plan calls for over 160 sqft per student. New educational information shows that large hallways are wasteful and counterproductive to a well balanced school.



    If you want to see how others have spent money look at the link.

    file:///C:/Users/Robert/Downloads/SPMConstruction2013.pdf


    There are so many things wrong with the design of the new school for future teaching. One simple study shows that bullying drops significantly when large communal bathrooms are eliminated and bathrooms are attached to classrooms. The behavior and cleanliness of bathrooms also improves tremendously.

    From watching the meeting all I can say is Wow. Who thought building a school that would require rerouting traffic with absolutely no parking for parents (parent teacher nights, etc) was smart. This school is sharing parking with the police station. Is this good for students/teachers/police or the town.
    How does the school parking work with expanding the police station?


    This school is to big, way overpriced and in a terrible location. It also places the burden on financing on Templeton even though fully 1/3 of the students will be coming from Phillipston. I will not support this school plan as is out of line with the reality for Templeton taxpayers and would not be ideal for our children.


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  6. Odd no mention of the question, was there any thought about this area being a historical area. No real answer given other than to say it has a flat roof and trees of our choice. Another flat roof like we have at gansett with problems.
    So when the school gets the go ahead all students for 2 years will go to another location,gansett as construction takes place.
    We need a new school but 50 million and change the town center to fit it there? Almost 2 million will be spent to tear up Wellington and south rd to make the traffic work. Will the traffic studies done prove to be a flaw and like the calculators don't add up things correctly. No outdoor playground fields? The other proposals had multi fields and parking for a multi use building. For us to use this as a multi use building we will need a parking garage built or pave the common . The people at the presentation say the gym and caf. area could be used for multi functions. She just didn't tell people they needed to be bussed in to attend.When the Templeton arts and craft shows on the common happen where will the people park when the back school area get a new building put on it.With pre k and k along with 5 grades move to Templeton the traffic may be more then people are thinking. Just the parking for the pre k and k to park and bring kids inside will be more parking needed then allowed for all the school needs.no mention about handicapped drop off unload areas. We all know how many spots are there for handicapped now so why not now?
    This project may not be a good fit for the town or the kids.
    Templeton needs to get this right as we will live with the bill for it for 28 years.
    The pitch for people to purchase a home in our town is to have a look at the new schools and how good they are.
    If they can't park to look around the school they may not want to purchase a home or build here. Any business or other new building in town must have a parking plan and proof it is enough to make it work out for everyone.
    I would rather build less of a school and do it with our own money than be under the thumb of the msba telling us what we have to build. The other option we are told is nothing,after November 1.

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  7. David,

    Did you look at the link I posted. I realize that is it based on 2013 data, but the average elementary school in zone 1 costs about the same as the MSBA alots for financing for the Templeton School and the town is still stuck with $20+ million in added debt.

    We should be able to build a school in templeton for Less than $30 million based on the data from the link posted. Why are we being asked to pay $511? Doesn't seem to be any reason.

    The school gets no field, no parking. As you mentioned it would not be a viable "public use" building due to lack of parking. I think this is a poor plan for Templeton. I would destroy the appeal of the "town" along with the budget.

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  8. David,

    Did you look at the link I posted. I realize that is it based on 2013 data, but the average elementary school in zone 1 costs about the same as the MSBA alots for financing for the Templeton School and the town is still stuck with $20+ million in added debt.

    We should be able to build a school in templeton for Less than $30 million based on the data from the link posted. Why are we being asked to pay $511? Doesn't seem to be any reason.

    The school gets no field, no parking. As you mentioned it would not be a viable "public use" building due to lack of parking. I think this is a poor plan for Templeton. I would destroy the appeal of the "town" along with the budget.

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  9. Bob i have not looked yet but i plan on it tonight.
    As with many other issues Templeton has had in the past it's up to the group who gets the most voters to the polls. Not who knows best for Templeton. Most of the politicians will vote yes to keep the seats they have. They know who put them there.

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  10. Bob after looking at the link you put up i was filled with questions i would have asked the other noght at the forum.
    What the per square foot amount is base on grealy changed the amount from a high of 528 per sf to a low of 406 per sf.
    The amount of the site work included is questionable as is the changes to wellington and south road. What engineering costs are and are not included to do the changes roadwise. Many things other than a school are involved to do this where they want it. The new school being built on a pre used site like it is now will have many unknowns. If built on a never used area it could have a much lower risk factor and not need a contingencies of 2,531,290.00. with this available for the road work and all other things [surprises] will it be enough? Does the contractors bid include anything other than the actual building? Does Templeton get hung out to dry if the site is found to be a hazard area when they dig up the unknown?
    People must plan on other tax increases and higher school budget like in the past we don't have control over.
    Can we think the NRSD will freeze their budget and not want more year in and year out?The nuclear option that was used in the past my be toxic to this project. After all we have been lied to about being under effort. There is proof of that now thanks to our former member of the Advisory board Bernie Heiney. Like the facts about the chip boiler we are told what we need to hear to pass it!
    More to come soon.

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    Replies
    1. This plan is no good, plain and simple. Shame on this committee for even putting this in place. Last ditch option is not good enough to push the town into this deal, just so MSBA can give money that will be a waste. Anyone with common sense can figure that this is poor planning, if that is what you call it. Why do the schools look the way they do ? Because the schools have not lifted a finger to fix anything in their effort to get a new school. Ok, but I do have a feeling we will be worse off if this thing floats, but then again so did that big boat last week. Just because it floats does not mean it is a good idea. God rest their souls.

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