The Springfield Public School District will host a series of facility meetings to get input from the community on what sort of improvements are needed in its schools.
Teresa Bledsoe is the Communications Director for SPS.
“We want to engage the public in providing input about our existing facilities and what our future needs are.”
SPS has begun a facility master plan with a goal of schools and facilities that will best support students’ current and future needs. It began in February 2016 and will continue into the fall.
The facility meetings are just the beginning of this plan.
According to Bledsoe, those who attend will be given information followed by an interactive polling opportunity and then some small group discussions. She says the meetings are designed so stakeholders can give feedback and share ideas.
The first meeting will be at Central High School on Tuesday, April 26th at 5 pm. The other meetings will be at Reed Academy, Kraft Administrative Center, and finally at Cherokee Middle School. The link for the dates and times for those meeting is here.
The Master Facility Plan and Project Goals are split into three phases with the facility meetings as Phase One.
Bledsoe explains “It’s a long term plan for where we need to be directing our resources to improve our facilities to best meet our goals…and this will help identify those priorities, assess any shortcomings we might have and how we might improve upon those.”
The next phase will be to conduct facility assessments. This means that SPS will send out teams to each school to examine the current conditions of their learning environments. The standards they will assess by were developed with input from district leadership in four areas: environment, room size, location and storage. To submit feedback on an SPS facility, click here.
The last phase will focus on developing master plan options. The district expects to have all the information and data collected by this point and will use it to meet Focus Area 3 of its plan, which is Financial Sustainability and Operational Efficiency.