Archive: Around Town

Guest EditorialThe meeting of the public, the Ad-Hoc Facilities Committee and the Lansing Board of Education on the evening of February 6th was, in my opinion, a perfect expression of the democratic values upon which this country was founded. Our elected representatives asked what the community wanted, the community participated, and it looks like the Board will act on the community consensus and delay the April budget vote and rethink the scope of work for the school complex.

This will delay the project for at least one year. Some desperately needed maintenance and small capital projects may have to be acted upon before next year (bus garage fuel pumps, etc.), and the Lansing community may need to approve some stop-gap school funding or tap some reserves to tide over the schools until a new scope of work can be approved and constructed (construction wouldn't be complete until about 3 years after a voter-approved project).

It feels like the Board needs some expert assistance in community outreach methods to ascertain what the public will ultimately support in terms of scope, cost breakdown, schedule and future tax impacts before going to the ballot box for a budget. If there is this kind of expertise in the community, the Board sounded like they would welcome it.

It also feels like the community needs to do a much better job of supporting the Board. I believe all of the Ad-Hoc committee members owe the board their continued participation in this process until we have, as a community, reached a consensus, if not a warm fuzzy place. Keep in mind a consensus doesn't appease everyone, but is an acceptable outcome to the majority of voters.

The most pressing question that the Lansing community will need to answer is: what kind of school programs will we support? This must be answered before we can define what we want to construct.

Do we want Lansing to be renowned for its performing arts programs? Do we want to be known as “the” fine arts school of upstate New York? Do we want to be the Bronx High School of Science, upstate branch? Do we want to keep the facilities expansions as spartan as possible and dedicate fewer resources to sports, music and arts to allow us to focus on academic test scores and college placement percentages? The Board needs to enlist and engage the citizens of Lansing in this path finding, as clearly the 5300 or so Lansing taxpayers don't have enough resources to support all of the above.

Should part of this discussion recognize our excellent local university and colleges? Perhaps we should ask ourselves if our Lansing school programs should be geared to help our graduates stay local and attend Cornell (with it's emphasis on scientific research, engineering, agriculture, labor law and business) or Ithaca College (deep into the arts, communication and music) or Cortland State (a teaching and athletics school) or Elmira College?

In closing, the themes that I believed were echoed in the meeting were:

Renovations:

Unanimous support for renovations, with caveats: Prioritize the renovations starting with Must-Dos. These include life-safety, code compliance, and things that are broken and worn out. Must-Dos also include renovating spaces that are currently failing to serve the school’s basic academic mission; which oversimplified are the classes and learning environment directly related to high SAT scores and college placement and strong vocational preparation for those students entering the skilled trades. The above would form the minimum scope of the renovations. From there, proceed to the Like-to-Dos, such as moving the main office next to the entrance to be able to control and/or observe building access. The Like-to-Dos will require a lot of discussion to get to a consensus on scope.

Expansion:

Some of the Must-Do renovations will require some expansion. This would form the minimum expansion scope. Again, the final expansion scope will depend on what Like-to-Dos renovations are chosen, what the Lansing residents want the school to be, and what we can afford.

My hope is that our next renovation scope is very similar to the one that has been presented, with the additional items of making a safe public road crosswalk between the middle and high schools, and modernization of the elementary school’s air handling systems as part of any near-term project.

I also hope that when we expand the schools (which we will do to some extent), we do so with a nod to the future and end up with a flexible design that can be easily expanded again and has multi-purpose spaces that will maximize their usefulness.

----
v2i6