By Alex Malm
During the Aug. 18 Londonderry School Board meeting one of the updates that the Board received was in regards to the facilities master plan.
Interim Superintendent, Dan Black, explained they condensed the reports from the Trident group for the different schools and he tried to map out what he thinks will come up first for different needs and wants.
Black said that he feels that Moose Hill is their number one priority for a number of different reasons.
“We are out of permanent space. Classrooms will need to be added. The question will be do we add the classrooms we need for LEEP and our Kindergarten program that currently exists, or do we add classrooms that can accommodate LEEP and a Full Day Kindergarten program,” Black said in a memo to the School Board. “The Kindergarten Committee will make their first public presentation on September 20th and start to gather feedback from the community this fall.”
After that Black stated the high school is a major priority.
If the school district didn’t focus on individual schools; Black argued the number one issue are the different mechanical problems.
“If we step away from focusing on one building first approach, I believe there is an argument to be made that district wide we have a lot of low ratings when it comes to ‘mechanical,” said Black. “I would recommend that we gather more specific information on all of our HVAC systems to figure out if anything needs to be replaced in the next couple of years so that we get ahead of a system failure in any building. The architects and the Trident Group confirmed that if we did need to replace a boiler as an example in any school, we could still use that new boiler in any larger update to that building. If getting ahead of our most pressing “mechanical” issues does become one of our first priorities, I believe we should see if there are further grants and subsidies we could tap into related to energy efficiency.”
Black told the School Board that the architects would be attending the building tours on Aug.24 and Aug. 25 and that they would be able to answer any questions that the School Board or members of the public have.
School Board Vice Chair Sara Loughlin said that the main thing moving forward is kindergarten and thinks that is something they need to determine before they move forward with different projects.
“I’d like to see where we’re going forward with that first,” said Loughlin.
School Board member Bob Slater said that they need to look at phase 1 at Moose Hill which would add classrooms if they are even going to think about having kindergarten.
It was also pointed out by Slater that because of the 100s wing of the high school there isn’t anything they can do about adding more classrooms or space to the high school.
Slater said that he wants to lay out where they want to be and have their priorities of what they should do and then have a forum to get some public feedback.
The rest of the School Board ultimately agreed and decided to possibly have a committee to study or just go with their suggestion and then see what the public thinks.