School district task force moves forward

By JESSICA KELLER - ARGUS OBSERVER
Sunday, September 9, 2007 3:51 AM PDT

The Ontario School District Building Facility Task Force will be examining the needs of the school district’s school buildings, including Ontario High School, to develop a comprehensive, 20-year facilities master plan during the next several months.

ONTARIO - After month’s of planning and discussion, the Ontario School District Building Facility Task Force recently convened and has already staked out the preliminary groundwork to tackle the daunting task of examining future district facility needs.

The task force evolved from a series of recommendation presented by Crandall Arambula LLC earlier this year.

The task force, which is comprised of 17 volunteer members from the community and an Ontario School Board liaison, met for the first time Aug. 22.

Task force Co-chairman Ken Hart, a local CPA and father of four children, said the first meeting basically was an organizational session, where the chairmen were named and three subcommittees established.

The rest of the meeting was spent in a round-table discussion regarding the past failed bond measure, needs of the schools educationally and structurally and what task force members could bring to the table and how they could generate community participation and support.

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“We’re still very, very new,” Hart said. “We’re still working on kind of what is the end product.”

He said what the task force aims to develop is a comprehensive, long-range 20 year plan that takes into account school district needs, facilities needs, existing resources, existing facilities and what the community will support to implement the plan.

A benefit of the task force is the members come from diverse backgrounds, Hart said, with different ideas on what should be explored.

Those concepts formed the foundation of the three committees — the finance subcommittee, communications committee and senior citizens committee.Task force member Michele Grimaldo said among the three committees, task force members will look into alternative funding sources, what the people want and don’t want, what they’re willing to support financially and what they feel is necessary for the students and how that meets curriculum needs.

“And where there are disparities, we’ll be looking for solutions and proposing those solutions,” Grimaldo said. “We need to come up with a solution to the disparity in our school facilities that our entire community can support.”

Grimaldo said the school district facilities situation is critical, adding the task force will aid in solving the problem by developing the comprehensive, 20-year plan.

“We have children who need good educational facilities, and they need that now and not five years from now when we can agree with something,” she said.

The task force, however, will have some help from outside experts. One of the consultants Richard Higgins, an architect from DLR Group, Portland, who also participated in the facilities study earlier this year, suggested to Ontario School Board Chairman and task force liaison Cliff Bentz, that task force members work with a special planning group to examine Ontario’s situation.

Higgins, who is a member of the planning group, the Council of Educational Facility Planners International, said the group meets once a year for a fall retreat, during which time they develop solutions to hypothetical problems involving educational facilities and school needs. Bentz said Higgins said Ontario would be a perfect fall retreat hypothetical study, and the task force could take the suggestions and ideas presented from the session and use it in their work at no charge.

Council of Educational Facility Planners International members will travel to Ontario this week to meet with district administrators and educators and also meet with the group of eight task force members who will participate in the fall retreat, Oct. 26 through Oct. 28, in Sun River, Idaho.

Bentz said the Council of Educational Facility Planners International members will develop long-range facilities master plan options to aid the task force the next nine months or so, with the understanding the ideas presented are only alternatives and not binding.

“So to say we’re fortunate would be an understatement,” Bentz said. “This kind of help and insight doesn’t happen every day for free.”

The time frame needed for the facilities task force to complete the work is estimated to be about eight or nine months, but Hart said the members have a lot of ground to cover during that time period before they can make a recommendation to the Ontario School Board.

He said one challenge the task force must tackle is incorporating a long-range facilities plan that will satisfy the educational needs and direction the school district will follow in the next 20 years.

“So it’s hard to separate educational goals from how you structure your educational facilities, and that to me will be the most interesting piece of how the future looks,” Hart said.

Again, however, he reiterated the importance of community input for the project and urged Ontario residents to participate.

A major goal for the task force is to meet with members of the community during the process and hear what residents think. The task force will also use several different mediums to inform the public of its progress and keep them involved, Hart said.

The public is also welcome to attend the task force meetings.