SHAWNEE TOWNSHIP — The Shawnee school board has started discussions on future building projects and how a potential levy campaign might look.
In the Jan. 6 meeting, the board heard from three architectural firms — Garmin Miller, Fanning Howey and SHP Architects — about what services they might be able to offer should the school board decide on a new building.
“All of them are full service. They all did everything from start to finish. Once you tell them what you want, they hit the ground running. So we just wanted to see what was available to us,” said Shawnee board member Mike Carpenter. “It’s in their best interest to get the issues and levies passed so that they can build.”
A roundtable discussion was scheduled for Tuesday night at the Shawnee Township Building but was postponed to a yet-to-be-determined date.
The upcoming discussion should give the board members a chance to openly talk about the district’s building needs and how to go about funding a potential project.
“We did a survey last year of our residents and found that a majority wanted some type of a new facility, but we didn’t decide on what. The middle school is so old and the high school’s not really technologically capable of doing everything we like to do with it,” said Carpenter.
Carpenter believes it’s important to plan ahead.
“We do want to do something. We’ve been talking about it for so long, and it’s just time.”
Don’t look for anything on the ballot this year, though.
“We do have, I think, a renewal this year that we might be putting on the ballot in November but again, all those things we need to decide. We just don’t have a strategic plan, you know, when do we want to do it, put it down in writing, you know, what do we want to accomplish? We just haven’t done that,” said Carpenter.
.neFileBlock {
margin-bottom: 20px;
}
.neFileBlock p {
margin: 0px 0px 0px 0px;
}
.neFileBlock .neFile {
border-bottom: 1px dotted #aaa;
padding-bottom: 5px;
padding-top: 10px;
}
.neFileBlock .neCaption {
font-size: 85%;
}
