As published in Manufacturing & Construction News - April 1, 2017
Lincolnview planning $5M community center
Lincolnview Local Schools is planning to build a 35,000 square foot community center on the campus of the current high school and elementary school in Van Wert, which will be available for both students and members of the community.
The board of education selected architect Garmann Miller, from Minster, in late March to design the project, which is scheduled to begin in September and be complete the following spring at an estimated cost of $5 million.
“Within that facility, it will encompass many things for our district,” said superintendent Jeff Snyder. “It will have a community room in that facility, a classroom, there will be locker rooms for our outdoor sports groups, a concession stand, restrooms, a ticket area, and then it will also have three courts that can be used for basketball, volleyball, or track and field, and it will have batting cages for baseball and softball, and there will be a three-lane track in it.”
Planning for the community center began several years ago when the board of education partnered with the Ohio Schools Board Association (OSBA) to work on strategic planning for the district.
“Through the strategic planning, we had teachers, administrators, parents, and alumni,” said Snyder. “About 50 community members met on four different occasions, and we also opened up to anyone in the community who wanted to be in on the strategic planning process. From those four meetings we had focus groups who met four times, and out of those four meetings came four areas of focus: academics, policy and procedures, communications, and facilities and infrastructure.
So we’ve been working on all four areas, and then this particular area, infrastructure, is where we start talking about the need for our current site. We threw a lot of things involving needs on the table. We heard from our community members, from our 50 community people who were on the committees, from administrators, our teachers, and we came up with a community-centered focus of how to build a community feel to what we do.
“If you’ve ever been to our district, it’s very similar in scope to the Evergreen school district, where the school sits out in the middle of a cornfield,” he continued. “So our school buildings do not sit in a town at all. With that, people come to our school and we are the community at the school. We felt, through that process, we wanted an even better connection with our community. They’ve been so supportive of our district over the years.”
According to Snyder, the district hopes to use the facility to hold 4-H meetings, Lion’s Club meetings, banquets, booster events, raffles, prom and homecoming dances, and a Parent Teacher Organization (PTO) carnival night or movie night. The school also offers after-school programming, and a latchkey program for students with working parents to wait to be picked up from school. Other possibilities include job fairs, college fairs, class reunions, graduation parties, and kindergarten screening. Snyder said he had recently talked to the county election board about potentially using this site for voting booths.
“Our goal is to use this building as a chameleon: anything we can think of possibly doing, we want to do that for our community,” said Snyder. “We haven’t set any hours for it yet, but I guess the first set of hours might be from 5 in the morning till 11 or midnight. We’re looking at people in our community, or open-enroll students in our district, or alumni, or people who work here, who will have to pay a nominal fee to get a key fob, and they will fob into the facility. You just have to live in our district, but if you’re going to bring kids up, you have to be graduate age or older to be able to bring other people in with you, and we expect you to be policing them.
“We’ve had a great reception already, people looking forward to it, and that has helped,” he added. “They want it to get done because they want to use it. We really want to challenge our teachers to think out of the box, to be able to do something scientific-related. We’re putting a classroom out there as well, so if they wanted to use the track lane to measure distance of an object or to do something unique, they could put something in the classroom and have it there for the next day.”
The facility will also have use for safety procedures.
“As we’re under one roof K-12, we have nowhere to go for an evacuation if there’s a threat in the building, so when we connect this community center our kids could go there if there’s a threat, as long as that building has not been compromised,” said Snyder. “We also are in an alley of tornadoes, unfortunately, and so in the fall or spring during outdoor sports, we have now a location versus trying to walk a good distance toward the school itself. We have an easier location for people to get out of inclement weather.”
According to Snyder, the board has been in discussions with local colleges and universities about staffing the facility.
“We are looking at this as a teaching tool, to reach out to the colleges and universities in our area who would like to do an internship for their sports management program,” he said. “On certain days of the week they can come to our district and help us staff the facility. We will have to probably look at reevaluating our current setup of cleaning – can we do it with our current manpower, or will we have to hire additional part-time custodians to help clean the facility? If it goes so well and we get so much usage, we’d probably look at the next stage of maybe employing somebody to run the facility.”
Snyder suggested that once the planning for the community center is complete, the district may also look at renovating the bus garage and adding two more bays.
