Stay or move? : Planning smartly: Top-notch facility for students possible on existing site
Posted on Sunday, January 20, 2008
Last February the Fayetteville
School Board made two
decisions important to every student, parent, teacher, and taxpayer in our community. In charting a future course for Fayetteville High School, board members voted 4-3 to retain a single high school and to switch to a 9-12 grade configuration.
Even with zero population growth, the new FHS will have to accommodate nearly 3, 000 students on its opening day. We are left now to determine where this enlarged high school will be.
Board members are considering two options. One involves new construction or major renovation on the existing 40-acre campus. The other requires the reconstruction of the school, its athletic facilities, and the district's central administration building at a new location, likely on the district's 100-acre parcel at Deane Solomon and West Salem.
BuildSmart, the local coalition I represent, supports the construction of a worldclass facility on the current FHS site. We take this position because we believe the current site offers significant advantages that cannot be duplicated elsewhere. Among these are:
Modest size - FHS currently lies on 40 acres. Reconstructing the school on a parcel two or three times larger increases the likelihood future school boards will find it financially expedient to expand the facility rather than open another high school. As Springdale, Rogers, and Bentonville scramble to build second schools, Fayetteville's school board president, Steve Percival, anticipates that 3, 400 students could be accommodated at the 100-acre Deane Solomon site.
Cost - Constructing the FHS complex on a new site will cost more. Bentonville anticipates its new high school will cost $ 100 million, a figure which includes $ 10. 4 million for athletic facilities but excludes a football stadium and the purchase of land.
This is relevant for Fayetteville because we seem to underestimate the cost of reconstructing everything on our current campus. The latest figures from the trade journal American School and University suggest a baseline price tag of $ 88 million. This number not only excludes the reconstruction of our athletic facilities, it overlooks the added cost of relocating the central administration building, which shares the current campus. Additionally, using infrastructure estimates provided by the city engineer, BuildSmart projects a 3, 000 student-community on Deane Solomon Road would require an infrastructure investment of at least $ 10 million to $ 15 million. While other large sites for sale in our area might not pose that problem, they would require a $ 10 million to $ 30 million land purchase.
A realistic price tag then for constructing the FHS campus elsewhere is at least $ 110 million and as much as $ 145 million, double the estimates for the district's options at the current site, which range from $ 40
million to $ 77 million. Of course, selling the current FHS could subsidize construction elsewhere. News reports suggest, however, that the UA is willing to pay no more than $ 25 million to $ 30 million, not nearly enough to offset the high price of starting over. Commute - Analysis conducted by the UA's Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies reveals that two-thirds of our district's third- through sixth-grade students live closer to FHS's current site than to the Deane Solomon alternative. As high school students, these students would travel an average of 2. 4 additional miles each day to a campus in the northwest corner of the district, bringing their collective total to more than 1 million additional miles each year. Not only does so much travel present an unnecessary safety risk, but it is hardly the mark of the sustainable community Fayetteville aspires to be.
Proximity - The current location offers extraordinary benefits by virtue of its proximity to the Walton Arts Center, the Fayetteville Public Library, and the University of Arkansas. By many measures, young adults compose the fastest-growing community of users of the library and having the University of Arkansas so near facilitates co-enrollment by FHS students in university courses. In fact, FHS students have taken more than 300 such courses since 2001. Moving the high school seven miles north would reduce such opportunities substantially.
The location of FHS will have enormous, long-term consequences for every member of this community. That is why a forum like this is so essential.
It also is why BuildSmart is encouraged by the board's recent decision to appoint a citizen committee to study the location question. In light of the closeness of the earlier board decisions, a weakening economy, and the sound defeat of Fayetteville's last millage proposal, great care must be taken to complete a realistic inventory of the costs and benefits of each option.
Equipped with such information, millage voters likely would join the Fayetteville City Council and the Fayetteville Council of Neighborhoods in opposing the reconstruction of the high school campus on another site.
However, BuildSmart believes voters can be convinced of the academic, economic, and environmental advantages of building a world-class facility on FHS's current site. That is Fayetteville's ticket to a 21 st century high school.
Janine A. Parry, Ph. D., is the parent of 2-year-old twins. She also teaches state and local government and directs the Arkansas Poll at the University of Arkansas.
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