We recently conducted a ThoughtExchange where we asked our SGI employees and students to answer the following question:
What ideas do you have about the physical improvements that you think we should make to our schools, fields, and facilities? And what do you wish or dream we could have here at Springville?
Believe it or not, it’s time for us to start planning the next capital project. It takes a couple of years to plan a project so as we begin to do so, I wanted to hear from our employees and students. The project we are concluding this year has many items that the architect and engineers identified as “need to do” items–rooftops, parking lot repaving and boilers. There isn’t a lot in this project that really touches classrooms and learning spaces.
For the next project, we want to consider all of our student spaces and what we can do to enhance our learning environment. As our school administrators work on walk throughs in our buildings and our architect considers our Building Condition Survey, the employees and students told us what they notice every day at SGI. You can read the Top Thoughts report here.
As promised, we will carefully consider all suggestions. Given our parameters around cost–we plan for the next project to have a minimal impact on taxpayers–there are items in the Exchange that we will attempt to do in house, items that will definitely be considered in the planning of the next project, and items that are unrealistic.
Participants top thoughts (meaning they received the highest rank from other participants) included:
- air conditioning
- bathroom updates
- lighting upgrades
- locker replacement
- kitchen equipment updates
- flexible seating options
The first five of those items are definitely things we can analyze for the next project. I’m glad that so many teachers are thinking about ways to change up their classroom seating for more project based learning. Furniture isn’t something that’s aided within a capital project unless it’s to outfit a new space. We work hard to maximize the aidable part of a project so this means we’ll develop a line item in the budget to pay for new seating as we’re able to do so, just as Mr. Bialasik did out of the HS budget for the library at SHS.
I do care what you think–just as the many comments about the quality of the food we served last year helped us to know we should move forward with a BOE initiative to bring our food service in house, these thoughts will impact our next project. Thank you to everyone who participated.
If you’re a community member and have noticed something that needs to be improved, let me know! You may leave a comment here or email me at kmoritz@springvillegi.org.