‘Ed Specs’ For High Schools Finished

Fill a room with teachers excited by the dream of two new high schools and you’ll get big ideas.

Asking those teachers to fit all those ideas into 232,900 square feet seems like an equally huge demand.

The Central Valley School District teachers who were asked to help plan the new Central Valley and University high schools have finished that task.

They came within 1.19 percent of their target.

“We’ve struggled with the actual size of classrooms. We’ve struggled with the capacity of the theater. We’ve struggled with the gym capacities,” said Jay Walter, one of two officials leading the educational specifications committee.

The school board will hear an update on the “ed specs” process at its Monday meeting.

The board will learn just how space has been allotted for classrooms, auditorium, gymnasiums and so on. All this information - the educational specifications - is given to the architect before he starts to design.

From the sounds of the committee’s final discussion this week on square footage, this group has struggled with everyting. In a day-long meeting Wednesday, the group went over draft No. 7 of the space allocation.

General classrooms merit 900 square feet. But almost every other square footage figure was up for one more good squeeze.

Each teacher on the committee represents a group of colleagues.

Choir teachers sent a message through their representative, U-Hi band director Keith Nielson, that the choir room, at 1,348 square feet was too small. They asked for another 300 square feet in order to work effectively with a 90-member choir.

The request died.

Health and fitness spokeswoman Jennifer Stalwick pointed out that those topic areas have their own state-required learning standards. She was trying to bolster the position of two planned health classrooms. She feared that, given a space crunch, those classrooms would be co-opted for general classrooms.

“You know they’ll take those health rooms. And we’ll be back (teaching health) on the gym floor,” she said. No one disputed her point.

How can space already be at a premium in “schools of the future” - to use a phrase from the Kids First bond committee? Is Central Valley building these schools too small?

“We’ll know that when we open the doors in 2002,” said Walter, head of curriculum for the school district. “Certainly we anticipate with present enrollment and historic growth patterns that those students will arrive in a building that will be comfortable.

“What the future holds, I can’t tell you. But initially I think we’ll be OK.”

Time and again, in the ed specs discussion, the concept of flexibility was invoked.

In the name of flexibility, health classrooms were renamed health/general classrooms. Same for the orchestra room.

And so it went. The green room, a longed-for amenity of a professional theater, survived heavy questioning. The library’s allotted floor space seemed ripe for “the hatchet,” said one teacher.

In the end, a 5 percent reduction spread over most spaces got the footprint down to the desired size. The schematic design process starts next.