Warren board to weigh options for new schools

The board will have a public meeting on school
reconstruction next month.

BY MAYSOON ABDELRASUL

VINDICATOR TRUMBULL STAFF

WARREN — The board of education will mull options for the construction of its new schools to address a steady decline in student enrollment.

The Ohio School Facilities Commission has three general options for the board to consider based on an analysis prepared by DeJONG Inc., a Dublin, Ohio,-based company.

Option one includes the construction of two kindergarten through eighth-grade buildings. One building will be at the Jefferson School site and the other at the Parkman Road site.

Each school will have 644 pupils, and the projected cost is $14.4 million, but the Parkman site will have extra mitigation costs.

The mitigation is necessary because the area of this site is on wetlands, and environmental prohibitions disallow buildings on wetlands.

Another option would be to combine the two schools into one large school with the site to be determined. The building size would be about 161,000-square-feet. The total cost is estimated at $27.8 million, depending on the site.

The third option is to renovate the current Reserve building (a middle school which once was a high school) and partial new construction to create a K-8 school. The pupil population would be 1,288, and the building size would range from 169,000 square feet to 187,000 square feet.

Public input wanted

Ed Bolino, board president, said he hopes for public input at a special board meeting set for 6 p.m. July 17 at Packard Shelter House. He said the board will gather and share information before making a decision.

Superintendent Kathryn Hellweg said she invites the public to the meeting to discuss the different options. The board will have to look at the options and see which one would provide the best quality education for the pupils in Warren, she said.

According to the DeJONG study, Warren City Schools enrollment over the past 10 years has decreased by 1,346 pupils in grades pre-kindergarten through 12.

The number of kindergarten pupils enrolled in the 1997-98 academic year was 660 as opposed to 514 in the 2006-07 year. The number of pupils entering the district to begin their education also has declined.

According to the report, “utilization of live birth data is recommended when projecting future kindergarten enrollments.” But the number of live births in Warren has dropped since 1991. The Trumbull County Board of Health reported 845 live births in 1991 and 553 in 2005, the last year used in the study.

Competition

The city schools are in major competition with the community schools. According to the report, the number of pupils leaving Warren for community schools has increased from 44 in 2000-01 to 584 pupils last academic year.

Another factor in the downsizing of the schools is open enrollment. Warren has open enrollment as do many other schools, and there was an increase from 89 pupils in 2003-04 to 115 pupils in 2005-06 using open enrollment.

But the number of pupils leaving Warren for other open enrollment schools was higher. A total of 256 pupils left the district in the past year.

And people are leaving the city as well.

For these reasons, the construction of the new schools has to be downsized, the report concluded.

In November 2003, district voters approved borrowing $40.7 million through the sale of bonds to finance the district’s share of a $153 million school construction project.

The district is working with the OSFC to replace all 13 of Warren’s current schools with one new high school and four new kindergarten through eighth-grade buildings. The high school and Lincoln school are in advanced stages of building.