The district's schools have exceeded their capacity and more students are on the way. Crowding is rapidly becoming a safety issue. Students do not have room to pass one another in the halls. There are simply not enough rooms in the high school with seating capacity to teach the classes that need to be taught. So far, to make space, support rooms for music, athletics and administrative functions have been converted to classrooms, making teaching music or sports training far more difficult. The high school has simply run out of classroom space to teach all the students and has run out of rooms that can be converted.

The plan is a comprehensive solution. What emerged after years of effort was a multi-year staged plan that links building a new high school and a immediately needed elementary school with the repurposing of the older high school as a middle school and a middle school as a elementary school. The plan balances out the changing needs for space for teaching in ways that are considered educationally sound, responding to a continuing increase in student population, while trying to hold costs down.

We build pride in our community by renewing our schools. We wanted to stress that a YES vote does not only helps our children by improving local education, but is part of a general effort to both ReNew our schools and community. Renewal comes about by the repurposing of the older buildings, while NEW involves the building of a modern high school and elementary school. But ReNew is about more than expanding school capacity. Improving schools is part of a broader effort in community renewal. A community with quality schools develops pride, attracts new businesses and is able to sustain and improve property values.

The current plan is the result of the input and effort of over 800 community members. The School Board invited citizens to volunteer for committees; one to look at how to handle the lack of capacity in the schools, the other on how to finance the efforts. After two years of work involving hundreds of hours of volunteer effort and active dialogue with citizens, school officials and architectural and financial consultants this current proposal came about.

The plan is fiscally responible. The proposed plan tries to balance educational needs costs and overall community impact. Both the School Board and the commitees carefully considered several other plans - repairing the old high school, having two high schools, setting up four distinct high schools and presented them at public hearings. Building a new high school and repurposing the old high school as a middle school expanded capacity and was dramatically less expensive than repairing the high school and in a few years having to build a new middle school. The final decision was based on one main concern; the single high school is less expensive to operate.