The Crookston School Board met on Thursday morning for a special meeting in the Crookston High School in Room D108 to discuss and decide on the options for the Middle School Building Project. Board member Tim Dufault joined the forum via phone call due to testing positive for COVID, but member Patty Dillabough was absent from the meeting.
After the call to order, school board chairperson Frank Fee opened the discussion on the Middle School Building Project. Superintendent Dave Kuehn reminded the board of some of the ideas the school board came forward with at their last meeting on Monday, June 27. He explained that the board initially leaned towards upgrading school facilities and maintenance and had two options. “The District has $4 million in Federal Funds that they have put in a balance they wanted to use for facilities. So, they wrote a plan through the Department of Education, and it was approved that they could use those $4 million to add six preschool classrooms at Highland as well as do some remodeling at the High School to accommodate moving preschool and kindergarten into Highland and moving the sixth-grade class to the High School,” Superintendent Kuehn explained. “That was part of a plan that I think has been discussed in the district for the past year.” Kuehn reported that their bids were from Bradbury Stamm Construction from St. Cloud for $4,490,000, which had risen from its original $3.4 million bid. The board noted they would have to find some way to fill in the additional million dollars as the bid expires next week, either by using the LTFM funds or another pool of funds the school had. The second option was to use the money for upgrades to the different facilities and capital items in the School District that would need to do over the next three to five years in maintenance projects. Superintendent Kuehn reported that both options were needed in the district, neither option was a bad option to go forward with, but that the administration team was leaning closer to the first option. Board Member Dave Davidson suggested that they could pool money from multiple different pools that the school had rather than taking all of it from one single pool.
Washington Elementary School Principal Denice Oliver believed that the additions to Highland would be helpful to the school, saying that Washington already feels the close space with the many preschoolers and kindergarteners coming to the school and potentially has 90 kids coming in for the 2022-23 school year.
Highland Principal Chris Trostad also mentioned that if preschool students joined Highland if they went through with Option 1, they would have to make changes to the playground to be more friendly to preschool students, but other members were concerned if Highland had the room to welcome the new students as they noted during the COVID pandemic that space was very tight, and with the rising prices of inflation, it may cost even more than what is planned now.
High School Principal Matt Torgerson came forward saying that he believed that the High School could create a separate school feeling for the middle school students with the addition while still being united with the high school students in some aspects, such as gym, band room, and industrial tech classes, and that now was the best time to fund those additions. “We have a lot of good things happening at the High School, but one area that I see we need to work on is transitioning those sixth-graders to seventh grade a bit better,” Principal Torgerson explained. “We do have some things planned out. We plan to meet with the junior high teachers to figure things out this coming year. I think doing a true Middle School would give us the opportunity to divide the students a little bit so that we could have the sixth, seventh, and eighth grade a little more self-contained from the ninth through twelfth graders.”
Board member Davidson asked how the $4 million would help the High School and Middle School students, which Principal Torgerson explained that the school would build a wall down the school and add some new classrooms and facilities, and split some of the staff that teach all of the grade levels down to teach for one of the individual schools or bring up some of the teachers from Highland, which could help some of their intervention programs for the Middle School students on the transition to High School and free up their schedules and make them more flexible.
Principal Trostad also voiced his support of the first option saying that the upgraded facilities could be a thing that would make kids want to come to Crookston and schools here, and they wouldn’t be going to the taxpayers to cover the costs.
Board member Davidson then asked that if they chose to go with the additions to Highland and the High School remodel, how it would affect the referendum with the multi-sports facility in the High School as people would wonder why none of the funds would go to paying for that rather than having to reach out to the community.
Superintendent Kuehn explained that the Federal funds they received would not be allowed to be used for a multi-use sports complex and had to go towards student needs and making up for learning students lost during the pandemic. “The dollars that we get from the Federal Government have to be used for needs for students, learning loss, and educational activities, and they would not have approved it for a football-track complex,” Kuehn explained. “That’s a separate project that needed to become a referendum and look for support from the community whereas these Federal dollars, there is some flexibility in the spending, but if we would’ve asked if we can use these $4 million to build a football-track, they would’ve said no.” Principal Torgerson asked if the board had a timeline of when the projects would be completed if they went forward with it. The board responded that the estimate for completion was by January 2024, which is when the funds would expire, so the students would make the exchange to the new schools in the 2024-25 school year.
The board then motioned to approve the bid from Bradbury Stamm Construction to do the Highland addition and High School remodel, which they approved unanimously. The next regular School Board meeting will take place on Monday, July 25, at 5:00 p.m. in the Crookston High School Choir/Orchestra Room.
