At a meeting in the Shepherd High School gymnasium, members of the Shepherd community gathered to listen to Jeff Kanning of Collaborative Design Architects, pitch a new, lower price plan for remodeling and adding on to the Shepherd School. By removing rooms and minimizing square footage of others from the failed bond and changing the construction type of the new buildings, the proposed bond price has fallen from its original $17.9 million to $11.9 million.
This new plan removes the administrative offices that were previously going to be on the second floor, leaving only a reduced-in-size library and space for two classrooms to be used as computer labs on the second floor of the proposed building linking the elementary school and high school buildings. The total area for the new building was also reduced by reducing the square footage of the new lunch/multipurpose room from 6,400 square feet to 5,200 as well as reducing the area of the kitchen, library, vocational agriculture building, and weight room.
Since the weight room was identified as an area that local residents didn’t feel was necessary to spend additional money on, it was also decided that it will be only a shell and will require private money to finish at a later date.
This new plan, while heavily scaled back, will still allow for some growth within the school system in the years to come and help update the school to more modern standards. Kanning said they haven’t determined what the final tax increase will be if the bond passes, but with the total cost down by one-third it should be a substantial cut from the tax amount proposed by last month’s failed bond.
There will be a final discussion on the new proposal on June 11th at the Facilities meeting in the Shepherd High gym. This will be the third and final opportunity for the community to voice their input on how the plans should change before its planned finalization no later than July 1st.
The projected date of the new bond vote for these plans will be September 10th, and the architects and school board would like to remind everyone that both the elementary bond and the high school bond must pass to get either of them.
