The Board of Education for the Blair Oaks R-2 school district met Wednesday evening to discuss how the district could afford to build the first phase of a new high school it may ask voters to approve on the April ballot.
The Architects Alliance's Principal Architect Cary Gampher and Project Manager Leslie Backstrom showed the board four different options for a base bid for a new high school.
The base bid options were not final designs, but ways to spark conversation about what the district can afford for a first phase of two, given the district's $14 million bonding capacity.
For example, one bid showed just about everything the district wants from a first phase - 81,000 square feet, including six temporary classrooms on a mezzanine level in the gym, although without any agriculture or family and consumer science classrooms.
However, that bid was projected to cost $16.4 million - including site work costs, a 5 percent contingency fund cost and a 7 percent cost for professional services.
The other three options showed how the district could think about taking chunks of its desired basic design and making them alternates in a bid to get the potential project under budget.
The second option for phase one costs $15.9 million for 78,000 square feet, with a couple less classrooms and having to use 7,500 square feet of fine arts classrooms as temporary spaces for other subjects.
The third option costs $15.2 million for 74,000 square feet, but did not have any classrooms for band, choir or art.
The fourth option costs $13.7 million for 67,000 square feet, but only featured half of a gym, with a temporary wall where it would be expanded later, and still probably required temporary classrooms in the fine arts spaces.
Gampher said it doesn't make as much sense to plan on expanding a gym in four years, as opposed to a longer time scale such as 15 years.
If approved by voters in April, the first phase of a new high school would be projected to open for the 2021-22 school year, with the second phase completed in 2025.
A full auditorium was included in all the base bid options presented Wednesday.
Board member Mark Brandt suggested without scaling down the gym, which no one on the board was in favor of, or the auditorium, designating the fine arts classrooms and four other classrooms that measure a combined 5,000 square feet as alternates to the base bid for phase one seemed to be the only logical approach to stay under the $14 million budget.
The board did not make any definitive decisions Wednesday, and will likely have another work session on or before Jan. 15, when its next regular board meeting has been scheduled.
"We've just got to come up with what definitely falls under the base (bid)," Blair Oaks' Superintendent Jim Jones said of the work the board has to do. The ballot for the April election has to be certified by the Cole County clerk Jan. 22.
"I still think we're hopeful to get all of them," Jones said of alternate options, but he added the district has to be prepared for not having those spaces available after the first phase of construction, if bids don't come in low enough to be able to afford them.
"What we're doing is keeping that vision for 2025 in front of us," he said.
Gampher said geotechnical work on the site of the potential new high school - across Falcon Lane to the northeast of the current Blair Oaks Middle School - did not reveal any surprises.
He said the types of soil features encountered - deep bedrock, floating pieces of rock or soft clays that would have to be removed and replaced - have been encountered at the locations of Blair Oaks' other school buildings, and "anything we found on this can be mediated."