By Isabel Costian
On Monday night the Board of Trustees will decide whether or not to put a proposed $437 million bond before the public for a May vote. If passed, the debt service tax would be raised by 8 cents.
The bond is only for things that are capital in nature, which means that they have a useful life of more than a year. If passed, it will affect all campuses of the district and will result in many changes to Richardson HS, including the addition of 21 classrooms, a new multipurpose facility built on the practice field next to Mimosa Dr., a Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (JROTC) program, a revamping of the library, and an extensive renovation to the orchestra room.
“It hits us in about every category except like, we’re not going to get any playground equipment,” Principal Charles Bruner said. “The bond will make this school an idealistic, more open, and more inviting place to learn.”
The bond has many requests which will be completed at different times. The requests that pertain to Richardson HS are slated for completion by the 2018-2019 school year, but some things, such as upgrades to technology, could be completed by the fall of 2016. Most of the construction will occur over the summer of 2018 because the city has to approve zoning requests.
The bond proposes that a multipurpose facility will be added to each of the four high schools in the district. Originally, it cost $81 million, but by cutting out a golf driving range and making storage space, a training room, and offices smaller, the total amount was brought down to near $60 million.
“We value golf, but we didn’t need that to be a separate air conditioned facility, so we cut that out,” said Deputy Superintendent for Finance and Support Services Tony Harkleroad. “We didn’t sacrifice it, we just took it out of ancillary space.”
There will be netting in the ceiling that will drop down and partition the field that allows different groups to practice at the same time in the facility, including different sports teams, marching band, and the drill team.
“It’ll be a good addition to our school,” said Assistant Head Football Coach Jason Gunter. “We’ve lost a lot of practice days due to weather in the past, so I think this will give our students a lot more opportunities to practice.”
The outdoor multipurpose facility was designed by looking at the existing facilities in the Highland Park, McKinney and Plano school districts to see what was successful and what was unnecessary.
“I think it’s a neat opportunity to protect our students from the elements,” Bruner said.
Another big change is the proposed addition of 21 classrooms to the building to accommodate the enrollment projections for the next few years, which exceeds the current limits of the building.
With new students will come new teachers, and the classrooms aim to help with the overcrowding problem the school will soon face.
“I’m looking forward to alleviating the traffic in G Hall,” Bruner said. “The fact that we’ll have 21 classrooms in a different area of the school will help to solve that problem.”
To add 21 classrooms, the board is planning on infilling the area around the Living Materials Center to make a two or three floor addition to the school, which will affect the AP Environmental Science (APES) class. APES teacher Tony Strohmeyer will be able to influence the architect’s plans for the new space for his program.
Strohmeyer is hoping for more natural green space, a greenhouse replacement, and a lab for more than 30 students because of increased enrollment in his class.
“I’m kind of nervous about it,” Strohmeyer said. “It’s also kind of exciting that they’ll give us the new facilities that we’re hoping for.”
This addition is proposed to add more space for the Health Science and Technical Theatre Magnets, Business Management, STEM, and the teaching internship programs. Also, more Career Technical Education (CTE) rooms will be added. The construction will likely start in the summer of 2017 and continue through the school year.
“The biggest thing for Richardson High is the addition of 21 classrooms,” Harkleroad said. “That will be huge. I think that’s going to be terrific.”
If the bond passes, there will be a new JROTC program at every high school excluding Berkner, which is currently the only school that has an active program. There are plans for one off-campus obstacle course that the four high schools will share.
The library will have improved connectivity and power along with becoming more automated. There are plans to create different zones and collaborative spaces. The plans include having mobile bookshelves, soft seating and even a café for students and staff. There are also plans to expand library hours to give students without internet at home more opportunities.
“It’s not going to be my dad’s library anymore,” Harkleroad said. “It’s going to be your library. It’ll have a Starbucks kind of a feeling instead of a stuffy, quiet zone. It will not look like it looks like now.”
Another proposed renovation is to the orchestra room because of increased numbers in class size. The room will be expanded by getting rid of the concrete underneath the nearby ensemble room to make it level with the orchestra room.
“I wish we had more land at Richardson High, because then we would have so much more flexibility there,” Harkleroad said. “It really makes it quite difficult with that constraint.”
Certain sports such as tennis, track, softball and baseball will receive a refresh of capital equipment to replace equipment that has reached the end of its useful life. The turf of the football stadium, which is well over the end of its useful life, will be replaced as well.
The weight room will be renovated into a wrestling room, the existing wrestling room will be made into a training facility, and the multipurpose facility will have a weight room.
In order to solicit more input from the citizens that the bond will affect, the Board introduced a new program called the Listening Tour this year. In the fall, there was a stop on the tour at each high school for citizens to speak their minds on the raw list of possibilities.
“It was good to get the additional input, but taking that raw data out to the community without vetting it beforehand, I wouldn’t recommend doing that again,” Harkleroad said. “I think it just created a lot of anxiety for people. I would want to come somewhere in between.”
Every five years, a new bond proposal is devised for the district. This is by far the largest proposal the district has ever asked for, but every proposal in the past has been passed.
The debt tax rate, which is a tax on anyone who owns property in the school boundaries, is a few cents per hundreds of dollars of value. It is currently at 30 cents and has a maximum of 50 cents. If the bond is passed, the debt tax rate will go up to 38 cents. If it passes, the bond will be $417 million, and $20 million will be taken out of the debt service fund balance, a reserve of the district.
The Board of Trustees has been planning for this bond proposal since 2014. They do a walkthrough of each building with the building’s principal and assess which needs are the most time sensitive in order to add them to the proposal.
“When it’s over, it’s a relief,” Harkleroad said. “It’s a very demanding time.”