Officials from Austintown to visit regional schools, pick architect

By Ed Runyan

AUSTINTOWN — School officials will visit new and renovated schools in Youngstown, Medina, Leavittsburg, Orrville and Uniontown next week to help them select an architect for Austintown’s proposed school construction project.

Doug Heuer, Austintown superintendent, said he will make the trip with Treasurer Barb Kliner and board member Lou Chine. The four other board members are invited but have said their jobs and other commitments may prevent them from attending, Heuer said.

On April 10, the group will travel to the new K-fourth grade Harding Elementary School and to Chaney High School, both in Youngstown. Chaney was recently expanded. The buildings’ designer was Olsavsky-Jaminet Architects Inc. of Youngstown.

Also on April 10, the group will go to Medina County to tour the renovated Medina High School and Community Recreation Center designed by Fanning/Howie Associates Inc. of Dublin.

Olsavsky-Jaminet and Fanning/Howie worked together to design the new Austintown Middle School that opened this school year.

On April 11, the group will visit school buildings designed by the Youngstown company Balog, Steines, Hendricks and Manchester.

One of them is the newly constructed grades three through 12 LaBrae school building in Leavittsburg, which houses 1,166 pupils in three wings: high school, middle school and intermediate. An elementary school serving kindergarten through Grade Two is adjacent to the new building.

Heuer said LaBrae’s new facility is similar to the proposed Austintown project because it houses a similar number of students. The LaBrae facility houses pupils in three “pods” or “learning communities.”

Heuer hopes to house around 1,400 pupils from kindergarten through Grade Three in one building.

The three school officials will also travel April 11 to Orville in Stark County. BSHM designed improvements to Orville’s high school and middle school and designed a new community center between the two. The community center includes a YMCA with a swimming pool, a branch of the public library and a medical office run by Mercy Medical Center.

The other stop will be the remodeled Lake High School in Uniontown, Stark County.

Heuer said the main reasons for making the visits are to see the architects’ work and to talk to school officials about how easy or hard the companies were to work with.

The district has been approved for a nearly 50/50 match of local and Ohio School Facilities Commission money to replace the district’s five elementary buildings with one or two new ones and to renovate Fitch High School and Frank Ohl Intermediate School.

Because Austintown’s project would involve both new construction and renovation, both types of projects will be seen on the trip, Heuer said.

One of the questions that will be asked at the renovated buildings will be how much disruption was experienced by pupils and staff while construction took place, Heuer said.

As for the decision on whether to commit to the OSFC project, that will be decided in several phases by the school board, Heuer said.

The first decision would be to hire an architect. Next, the board would need to vote in June to move forward with its planning. That would result in the OSFC budgeting — by August — the amount of state money Austintown schools will receive for the project.

Within one year, the school board would need to vote to fund the district’s share of the project.

Heuer has proposed the project be funded with a loan that would be repaid with the savings — roughly $1.5 million per year — that would be generated through the consolidation of the five elementary buildings into one.

The superintendent said the school facilities commission has told him it is permissible to build two moderate-sized elementary school buildings of around 700 pupils each or a large one of 1,400 pupils to replace the five elementary schools. The cost to build two smaller buildings is about $2 million more than one larger building, he added.

Heuer said having one large building rather than five smaller ones has educational advantages as well as economic ones. Having one building improves quality control by making it easier to ensure that all pupils get the same quality of education, he said.

Rick Savors, spokesman for the OSFC, listed the commission buildings recently built or in the planning stages that are most similar to the one proposed in Austintown.

They include one project in northwest Ohio — a 1,067-pupil pre-kindergarten-through-fifth-grade school being built in Defiance — and several south and west of Columbus.

Heuer said if the school board moves forward with the planning process, school officials would travel to see some of those facilities as well.

runyan@vindy.com