| School Details Hammered Out Tweaks made to play area, parking, music and teacher rooms |
| Tara Vocino Reporter TEMPLETON Members of architectural firms met with Templeton Elementary School Building Committee members on Tuesday to present an updated site plan of what the new school could look like. Civil engineer Peter Glick said the site plan is similar to what was presented before with minor changes. “The play area is starting to take a different shape than what you see now,” Glick said. “It’s continuing to be developed, and it’s being looked at.” Also, angled parking for six cars will be added to the parking lot with a total of 72 parking spaces. Glick said the update is good news. “We’re very comfortable with the progress,” Glick said. “It was what we were striving to get to. It’s starting to take shape, and there’s more development. It works out nicely with the site design that we established.” Jennifer Soucy, an architect associate with Symmes, Maini and McKee Associates, said teachers and staff are thrilled they’re getting a new building.” “Although the building footprint is the same as the original proposal, there are some changes that should be noted,” Soucy said. Although the number of special education classrooms won’t change, the way they are distributed throughout the building will, Soucy said. After meeting with the music teacher, they decided to combine both music spaces on the first floor. “They have an expanding band and chorus program,” she said. “They utilize instruments, and it’d be tough to carry them across floors.” Joel Seeley, director of project management for Symmes, Maini and McKee, said joining two music spaces on the first floor gives students maximum flexibility. On the first floor, they refined how to use space in the nurse’s suite. On the second floor, the media center remains in the same spot. However, after meeting with teachers, they suggested having one large teacher planning/staff dining space instead one space per floor or per department. “We got some good feedback from them,” Soucy said. “It’s a good way to socialize with other teachers.” They also voted who can sign the documents legally. According to interim Superintendent of Schools Dr. Steve Hemman, the Building Committee will approve agreements between Narragansett Regional School District and Massachusetts School Building Authority. “That vote will be sent to the Narragansett Regional School District School Committee for their approval and then authorizing me to sign the agreement,” Hemman said. The Building Committee will approve contracts for the building of the new school. “That vote will be sent to the Board of Selectmen for its approval and authorize the chairman of the Board of Selectmen to sign the agreement,” Hemman said. They also voted that the chairman of the School Committee sign the Total Project Budget Agreement and the Project Scope and Budget Reimbursement Rate Certification. Architects expect to be in the design document phase for 10 months with the construction and close-out phase for 20 months. The building is expected to be completed on Dec. 31, 2018. The new school will house 580 students. It has a total project budget of $47,563,184, with the state paying for $22.7 million. The cost to taxpayers will be $1.74 per 1,000 of home valuation for the length of the bond. |
Paul working for you.
Thursday, January 21, 2016
The Buck Stops Where?
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ReplyDeleteCan you imagine people making their way from the back of the Police Station, to the entrance of the School,in a torrential rain storm ? Maybe they could have "valet Parking" like the Hospital does !!
ReplyDeleteMoving the playground again !! Just take the equipment and put it in front of the Fire Station. Take the swings and the sea saws too. What does it matter, people do not have much respect for the past, and can not see beyond their nose to the future. A school like the one that is going to be built, a chestnuts throw from the Templeton Common, should have been placed in a area that has room. Room, so it does not have to be three stories, room so it has a place for the kids to play. This school needs to be built so the little leaguers can practice, or any other team that needs a place to just play ball. This school needs a safe place to be dropped off, for the children and adults, not on the side of the road. Templeton Center should be left standing, if only to replace the Town Hall in East Templeton. Where are the people who should have stood up with George Barnes ?? As Pauly would have said, "What do you say John Brooks" ?? "What do you say Mike Dickson" ?? Where are you Fred Henshaw ?? John Henshaw, are you under the seat ?? Where was I ?? Waiting and watching to see if you would stand up !! Oh yes, you are afraid we won't get a new school...I say we go to MSBA and tell them we need to move the school site to Otter River. Otter River has over 7 acres, or buy Putnam's property. It is only too late when the wrecking ball comes.
ReplyDeleteEvery time I read more info about this school I get this sickening pit in my stomach, It is just so wrong in so many ways. Can't some grass roots campaign get started to fight the location and find a spot better suited, There is land available in town, the argument was that a landowner had to come to the town with a proposal, the school building committee never approached people with lots large enough.
ReplyDeleteThis is a lousy plan put in place by the same people who replaced our budget with a "lost and found". Please tell me how are tax rate has been approved when we have had no audit? Please inform me of how we can be told the school will cost us $1.74 per $1000 when they are still redesigning and we dont have a BOND RATING!!!!!!
ReplyDelete63. Munsterberg And His Disciples: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
ReplyDeleteCHAPTER FIVE
True Believers And The Unspeakable Chautauqua
A very small group of young psychologists around the turn of the century were able to create and market a system for measuring human talent that has permeated American institutions of learning and influenced such fundamental social concepts as democracy, sanity, justice, welfare, reproductive rights, and economic progress. In creating, owning, and advertising this social technology the testers created themselves as professionals.
— Joanne Brown, The Definition of a Profession: The Authority of Metaphor in the History of Intelligence Testing
I have undertaken to get at the facts from the point of view of the business men — citizens of the community who, after all, pay the bills and, therefore, have a right to say what they shall have in their schools.
— Charles H. Thurber, from an address at the Annual Meeting of the National Education Association, July 9, 1897
63. Munsterberg And His Disciples
The self-interested have had a large hand conceiving and executing twentieth-century schooling, yet once that's said, self-interest isn't enough to explain the zeal in confining other people's children in rooms, locked away from the world, the infernal zeal which, like a toadstool, keeps forcing its way to the surface in this business. Among millions of normal human beings professionally associated with the school adventure, a small band of true believers has been loose from the beginning, brothers and sisters whose eyes gleam in the dark, whose heartbeat quickens at the prospect of acting as "change agents" for a purpose beyond self-interest.
For true believers, children are test animals. The strongest belt in the engine of schooling is the strand of true belief. True believers can be located by their rhetoric; it reveals a scale of philosophical imagination which involves plans for you and me. All you need know about Mr. Laszlo, whose timeless faith song is cited in the front of this book (xiii), is that the "we" he joins himself to, the "masters who manipulate," doesn't really include the rest of us, except as objects of the exercise. Here is a true believer in full gallop. School history is crammed with wild-eyed orators, lurking just behind the lit stage. Like Hugo Munsterberg.
Munsterberg was one of the people who was in on the birth of twentieth-century mass schooling. In 1892, a recent emigre to America from Wilhelm Wundt's laboratory of physiological psychology at Leipzig, in Saxony, he was a Harvard Professor of Psychology. Munsterberg taught his students to look at schools as social laboratories suitable for testing theory, not as aggregates of young people pursuing their own purposes. The St. Louis Exposition of 1904 showcased his ideas for academicians all over the world, and the popular press made his notions familiar to upper middle classes horrified by the unfamiliar family ways of immigrants, eager to find ways to separate immigrant children from those alien practices of their parents.
ReplyDeleteMunsterberg's particular obsession lay in quantifying the mental and physical powers of the population for central government files, so policymakers could manage the nation's "human resources" efficiently. His students became leaders of the "standardization" crusade in America. Munsterberg was convinced that racial differences could be reduced to numbers, equally convinced it was his sacred duty to the Aryan race to do so. Aryanism crackled like static electricity across the surface of American university life in those days, its implications part of every corporate board game and government bureau initiative.
One of Munsterberg's favorite disciples, Lillian Wald, became a powerful advocate of medical incursions into public schools. The famous progressive social reformer wrote in 1905: "It is difficult to place a limit upon the service which medical inspection should perform," 1 continuing, "Is it not logical to conclude that physical development. ..should so far as possible be demanded?" One year later, immigrant public schools in Manhattan began performing tonsillectomies and adenoidectomies in school without notifying parents. The New York Times (June 29, 1906) reported that "Frantic Italians" — many armed with stilettos — "stormed" three schools, attacking teachers and dragging children from the clutches of the true believers into whose hands they had fallen. Think of the conscience which would ascribe to itself the right to operate on children at official discretion and you will know beyond a doubt what a true believer smells like.
ReplyDeleteEven a cursory study of the history of the school institution turns up true belief in rich abundance. In a famous book, The Proper Study of Mankind (1948), paid for by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Russell Sage Foundation, the favorite principle of true believers since Plato makes an appearance: "A society could be completely made over in something like 15 years, the time it takes to inculcate a new culture into a rising group of youngsters." Despite the spirit of profound violence hovering over such seemingly bloodless, abstract formulas, this is indeed the will-o-the- wisp pursued throughout the twentieth century in forced schooling — not intellectual development, not character development, but the inculcation of a new synthetic culture in children, one designed to condition its subjects to a continual adjusting of their lives by unseen authorities.
It's true that numerically, only a small fraction of those who direct institutional schooling are actively aware of its ideological bent, but we need to see that without consistent generalship from that knowledgeable group in guiding things, the evolution of schooling would long ago have lost its coherence, degenerating into battles between swarms of economic and political interests fighting over the treasure-house that hermetic pedagogy represents. One of the hardest things to understand is that true believers — dedicated ideologues — are useful to all interests in the school stew by providing a salutary continuity to the enterprise.
Because of the predictable greed embedded in this culture, some overarching "guardian" vision, one indifferent to material gain, seems necessary to prevent marketplace chaos. True believers referee the school game, establishing its goals, rules, penalties; they negotiate and compromise with other stakeholders. And strangely enough, above all else, they can be trusted to continue being their predictable, dedicated, selfless selves. Pragmatic stakeholders need them to keep the game alive; true believers need pragmatists as cover. Consider this impossibly melodramatic if you must. I know myself that parts of my story sound like leaves torn from Ragtime. But from start to finish this is a tale of true believers and how by playing on their pipes they took all the children away.
ReplyDeletebuy Putnam's, hell no!!!! this guy is a very, VERY rich man. the land is valued for less than he wants for it. others have been willing to donate land!!! Putnam made his money of the people in town, let him give the land!!! put it in otter river !!!!
ReplyDeleteSo let's see...the school committee votes to allow the Supt. of schools to sign the documents after they have been approved by the Building committee and then it is approved by the chairman of the Board of Selectmen. What could possibly go wrong?
ReplyDeleteSo who is actually responsible for checking the invoices for accuracy? You know, to ensure a trip to the Patriots game isn't slipped into the bills so the taxpayers can foot the bill?
Bob M. - Right again...look at the way this is now phrased-
"The new school will house 580 students. It has a total project budget of $47,563,184, with the state paying for $22.7 million. The cost to taxpayers will be $1.74 per 1,000 of home valuation for the length of the bond."
No longer is it phrased that Templeton gets 62% reimbursement for this project, because someone along the way must have realized that the Town's portion $24,863,184 is not 62 % of $47,563,184.
Why worry about a bond rating? Most people don't have enough saved for a $500 emergency. These are the same people who think a town can vote on a $50 million dollar project, when the town does not have a bond rating and can't get Free Cash certified.
Not that I believe Free Cash is the solution to this problem. Free Cash should be set aside in Stabilization or capital stabilization.
Put the school where the Highway barn now sits and move the Highway to either Templeton Stuarts or the Sewer Treatment Plant, done. I have been saying this for fifteen years.
ReplyDeleteWith all the open land in Templeton why would anyone attempt to build a massive 3 story building on a postage stamp.
ReplyDeleteMs. Farrell,
I am seriously bothered by the idea of planning, voting and designing a $50 million dollar building while out finances are not in order. It appears to me to be absolutely irresponsible.
These people are still designing this building, how can anyone know the costs????? $1.74 per $1000.
The math is just beautiful right. Like the numbers you posted. The cost $47,562,184 x 62% equals $29,489,174 which would leave Templeton responsible for $18,074,010 so why are we being shown completely different numbers.
I've read that the MSBA funds from 40-80% of these projects. Why are we at 62% if we really are?
When people talk about this $1.74 they seem to think it reasonable. Thats somewhere between 10-12% increase in property taxes for 30 years.
Oh, another point. Who is making sure we wont get stuck like we have with the wind mill, school boiler, or the other projects in town that are defunct or over budget, behind schedule.............but Templeton ratepayers are still paying for this "government"........
And pay they will, for a very long, long time. There was a day when the taxpayer was helped by industry, and the Templeton Municipal Light Company. The industry has left town, so the new people can understand, and the TML, has become more and more tight fisted. That leaves you and me, plus the rest of the Town residents. I am all in as far as a grass roots group goes, but it is up to the people, who live near by. I am to old to fight every one else's battles.
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ReplyDeleteBob it is my understanding the 62% is for the building only costs.All of the other costs not related to the sq. foot building cost are not included. Site prep and road changes not covered. Playground move not covered. Trees and fences not covered. All non building costs can add up quick and when it got explained at the forums they were clear it was only 62% on certain building related costs. Do we want to spend on wellington road a new roadway to widen and change the intersections? You are! Do we want to spend ? unknown amount on moving the NEW playground somewhere? You are!
ReplyDeleteThere are more "You are" to come when they start to tear down a building that we could use for something else! You are not at a 62% and the cost to raise it are unknown.
A contingency cost of 2.5 million "should" cover things that pop up but may not.
You are! the 1.74 is not a hard number. Many things could drive the cost up higher.
David,Isn't this awesome. I like how you mention 2.5 million in contingencies which in itself would be another 1.5% or more on your property tax bill for 30 years.
ReplyDeleteFrom what I can see right now this school is going to cost me $50 a month for the balance of my life. I feel seriously bad for any retired people in town.
Can you imagine. A typical senior living on SSA will be asked to pay about 5% of their monthly income to pay for a school. This while getting no COLA adjustment this year. So this school will effectively kill the next 2-3 cola raises for SSA recipients.
Hey, do you know what type of heating system this school will have??? This school should not be set up to burn fossil fuels.