great ok well thank you for coming again my name is bill of all share the high school building committee and with me tonight will be talking will be john failon superintendent of belmont public schools so a quick agenda but tonight the school department his department's been doing regarding district enrollment issues and how that plays into the high school project we're going to give an update brief update on our vision and vision session that started or continued we actually started a visioning session earlier in the year but john will talk about what we've been doing today and tomorrow with our design professionals at the high school that hopefully won't take very long because we want to open this up to questions and comments from you folks and we have a mike down here sold by you later on to come down so we like to just get through some of the formalities first on the talking points and then hopefully you guys have some questions and we could start a dialogue  always like to start with our building committee volunteers of fifteen people the high school building committee that spend a lot of time we've been at this now well over a year started early last year in two thousand and sixteen these fifteen members volunteer their time and i like i say to them remind them that we're sort of a ten year commitment it's actually probably will take us about ten years before the project's closed out with all the financials and so forth so i always like to thank them here with me tonight from the belmont high school building committee is  you know just like all the other folks involvement great community where the committees and commissions and elected positions give their time and talents to belmont they are building committee continues to do that and i'm so impressed and lucky to be working with them so thanks again guys how do we get here where are we going there we go so i going to quickly go through this you've probably seen this before but i always like to remind the folks that are here that we have a partner in this the s b a the massachusetts school building authority and they have a process of working with  two hundred fifty one cities and towns in massachusetts and everyone who follows the same rules we're partnered with them and we follow their eight module process and we are right now going to go through this quickly working with them in that process so the blue sort of describes those modules the modules by the way are the the rectangular ones the blue describes what the district what belmont's doing we have to do and the green is what our design professionals need to do through that process so we started that process we were invited by the m s b a to go through their grant program back in february two thousand and sixteen and that was a nine month process called the eligibility period and through that  timeframe we had to work with them to establish the parameters of the project the early primaries of the project that took about nine months after that we entered into an agreement with them called the feasibility study agreement that was a formalized agreement that sets the parameters for the project and that takes that timeframe for that now is thirty months and in that the first step was forming the project  team we hired and in o p m owners project manager in april of two thousand and seventeen people said what's an o p m what's an owner's project manager the fifteen members of the building committee pretty much have full time jobs they work like i do and it's a struggle to do a project of this size without the professionals that that help us along so i'm big projects the state law requires that we hire firms that all they do is help folks manage large projects whether it's private or public so we went through a selection process and we're very pleased to have hired a firm called a list projects and with us today is tonga soonest and shane nolan both working with us on almost on a daily basis to help  navigate this process so they let's call the owner side  through the feasibility study process and i'm sorry and then we hired an architectural firm and i'm going to talk about them a little later because we're going to introduce them but that was part of forming the team the feasibility study process is where we are now it says it up there with the present stage and that process will take us probably through the early part of next year and that process will require that we study multiple scenarios for solutions and we're going to talk about those today give me a quick overview and at the end of that sort of beginning a schematic design we need to choose one we're going to choose a solution that's the most appropriate for belmont and then we document that through s design and then we work with the m s p a to get their approval then we come back to the belmont public for the funding which we anticipate to be somewhere around either november two thousand and eighteen or maybe  early two thousand and nineteen there's another election period in april we have to be done with our process through the funding we have to have funding in place a project to find and funding in place by may of two thousand one thousand that's the time frame wi after that it gets it's hard for us to tell you what the schedule is because we don't know the project right now we don't know exactly what we're going to be doing but the design process that allows us to develop construction drawings big drawings that type of thing will probably take about twelve to eighteen months and then construction depending on what we're doing and how we do it could take anywhere from twenty four to thirty six months plus or minus so that's  schedule our we engaging the community the building committee has been working very hard to get the message out but it but we need the belmont community to engage us and so we've established five more community meetings from the first one that we had earlier in the year today's number two and then others will be at different times of the week so we try to reach everyone we have one coming up in october at the beach street center the seniors were delighted to hear that we are coming to talk to them after after lunch and looking forward to that we have one on a saturday for those that work at night make it during the day so that's october twenty eighth and then we have a couple more come november and december as we move through these are not going to be the same you to come particularly october november december because we're be further along the process and we'll be talking more specifically about the project about we'll be showing models we'll be talking about how those configurations look how the solutions look and we'll be wanting to solicit feedback from you folks so that's our schedule i've been talking for a while now to the community and particularly i had an opportunity  at the burbank p t o last night and i had some great questions asked of me because we were handing out flyers and talking about the project and i just wanted to share with you some of those few questions that came and then i'll turn it over to  john maybe but i've questioned why do we need a new high school what's wrong with the one we have today the current high school built almost fifty years ago and it's been well maintained very proud of the folks that go in there even today when i was leaving polishing and shining the floors but fifty years it hasn't changed in fifty years there hasn't been a change to the building that much a couple of mechanical things that have broken and had to be fixed but the the school is at its maximum right now they've done a tremendous job of trying to fit programs in the school i toured the school and found that they took an old garage and converted it into a practice room and for the band that's  impressive they've taken some some study areas some some teacher collaborative areas tournaments a small classrooms they i think they can't do anymore at that school there's some modules out and back so it's it's it's really struggling to provide that quality period we work with the m s b a and their demographic studies john john and others provided the m s b a with data from belmont and they went through their algorithms and came up with a design population for belmont a projected five to ten years and john likes to say you know five years one to five years you're pretty good at projections over that you're guessing but you know they still went out ten years and we looked at those numbers and they still showed an increase in incline and we at the same time we hired our own consultant in this paper was a bit surprised that we hired our own consult but we did it because we wanted to check those numbers so mckay because mckibben associates worked with us and they also showed the same sort of slow increase in rome and so we went back and said we don't think we should stop at ten we think we should keep going because we think it's going to you know ten years from now we're talking about opening a school only be a few years old so they looked at it they they looked at it was for twenty years and and after that we talked to them about how belmont has new families moving in from from overseas we have new families that are coming in from new developments we have all these things coming in and we've just numbers with them but we had to arrive at a design roman for this project we had to sign a feasibility study agreement with numbers in and at the end of the day we can't change those numbers so so that was the process by which we developed the numbers to design in that agreement his belief that agreement for a nine through twelve configuration for grades nine through twelve fourteen hundred seventy students and a through twelve configuration at eight hundred forty five students a seven through twelve configuration at two thousand two hundred fifteen students i want to make it clear that design enrollment is not the same as capacity so in a high school design roman is used to stablish population in the core classrooms but not in every space and i talked about that garage space that was changed today the high school is using every single space they are at capacity and when you look at a high school in the way this is the classrooms are used and others that are sort of floating classrooms  news at the time what we find is that there is a factor maybe twenty five percent more maybe even more when we get done that will allow capacity to exceed design and roman so i just want to keep reminding folks that we talk about design roman it's it's a metric by which the classrooms are are laid out the square footage of the building is the fine but it doesn't mean capacity ok so that was another question roman so we said what happens to the high school when you're building another building or adding on to it well we only have one site to say this we live in the town with four point four square miles i think you could stand that we don't have another site to build a high school so we'll be looking at the site that's there today and we're going to have to recognise the fact that we provide a quality education in the facility that's there today and we need to maintain that while we build a school edition new whatever the case may be so so the students are going to stay in the building or potentially quite a quality space if you were in him for for wellington and they will allow for a transition where the students will be studying until the school the new project is done at no time will contractors be coming into a classroom somebody asked me this and start taking walls down why students are teaching i could i can assure you that we have always project manager an architect who both have experience in projects of this complexity where you have an active campus and you have and you have a construction project that's in tight quarters to that and said well the project be a new renovated project new building or renovated building we don't know yet the s b a requires that we look at each configuration with different with a different approach one being put it in the building that's the pretty sure we know that's not going to fit ok we have to go through the process another is use the building that's there and make an addition to fix up the buildings we're going to look at that that's they call a renovation addition and the third is they want to look at just a whole new building and so we'll be looking at all these different scenarios and we'll be evaluating them and we'll be finding out which buildings are most appropriate which solutions are most appropriate and then we'll talk about the educational propre ness of those and it's a process of evaluation that will take take us through the end of this year if not into the early part of next year oh this is one of my my my challenging questions how much is going to cost me how much is building cost because we don't even know what the building can figure out you know i it a seven through twelve nine through twelve and eight through twelve is it a renovation is addition we don't know what it's going to cost and it would be foolish for any of us to start talking about costs when we don't have anything to base that cost on but i can tell you that we retain dateless projects because not only are they don't as project manager but they are rooted in a firm that provides cost estimating so they have a long history cost estimate architect will also be doing cost estimate and will be doing these cost estimates as we go through the evaluation of different configurations and different designs so as soon as we start putting pencil to paper those those costs models will start to show up and we could then start to bring in the discussion of cos of the project be funded the m s b a and bringing us into their grant program makes a commitment to the district that they will participate and partial funding of the project course we have to follow the rules and have a lot of them and sometimes a change in but we have to work with them but they let their funding part is pretty defined early on so when we start when we signed the feasibility study agreement they said that they will contribute thirty six point eight nine percent of the eligible cost of the feasibility study and i can tell you from our treasure we are to receive reimbursement from some of the costs are ready so that process is working very well eligible costs though are not all cost to a project so if we spen million dollars and we're getting thirty six percent we're not going to get thirty six million dollars back because some things in their definition are eligible and what we have a design firm and we have enormous project manager that's been working with the s b a for a long time and they're coaching us on which eligible and they keep reminding us that the best thing we could do is try to develop a program and a project that keeps most things eligible so go through that do we qualify for the m s b a funding really quickly because a long story it starts over ten years ago so i won't go through that but belmont knew for a while that the high school was was challenged and so through the state process they require that the district submits a statement of interest to define what those challenges are with the school particular building whether it's space or whatever the need is so it's a long document and they evaluate that annually in their evaluations they consider all the other towns that submit and i went on their website and there are a lot of towns that submit every year but in two thousand and sixteen they granted an invitation into their grant program and that was pretty exciting and so that the s b a is is a group qua in the pentagon rupe that receives funding from one cent on the tax dollar so that's what they get their funding from they have to evaluate what their tax  collections are going to be and they have to figure out what those projects are so they could make commitments and they could actually fund them what is the m s b i should start with this the m s b a s a massive shoes a school building authority do they have a lot of control over a project they have a lot of control over a project they can't tell us what to design but they can tell us what the limitations are and we have a talented team like i said and we're going to work with them in regards to how that how that process works but i can dolls will tell you that this is not foreign to us not foreign to members on the building committee we did the same thing with them in wellington they know belmont i think they have a pretty good respect for us because when we show up they kind of know that we know our business and we're ready to talk to them so i'm happy to be working with some talented people over there we have people that are engaging us matter of fact our program manager right now the m s b lives in watertown so  he kind of knows what's going on so those are a few questions and i hope you have others that you could ask us as a program progresses but i go back and talk about our selection of our designer because you're key part of art team now so the building committee prepared an hour of p program that describe what the district was seeking regarding the school in the process by which we're going to go through design and the committee was looking for a design firm that was forward thinking would push the boundaries of the design high school design we were looking for defining our school as a typical state school state high school but we wanted to think differently because our educators in the school system are educating differently we wanted a firm that asked a lot of questions asked us the right questions so we could give them the right answers not a firm that just basically kind of knew this because they'd been doing this for a long time we wanted a firm that had the ability to engage the community to help us describe to you what's going on we wanted a firm with a strong emphasis on sustainability because we know that belmont has a desire to lead the way in sustainability we want to firm that was involved that would be involved in profit that was involved in prior configuration studies i talked about this before we're not just we're not just exploring a nine through twelve and john's going to talk about this but we're exploring others and we want some of that experience in that we want to firm that not just design new buildings all the time but had experience in existing construction renovations of existing construction we also were attracted to a firm that was a large multi disciplinary firm with a backer of some background and higher education experience because ultimately i can't remember the percentage but i'm always impressed very large percent of our high school students go on to higher education so i want to make sure that we're kind of tying they're linking this between what they're going to experience in higher education versus what we have coming out of middle school into the high school many firms responded to  process but one firm really rose above all the others and that firm as i said before is perkins and well and the building committee is proud to be partnering with perkins and will as we embark on this high school project so with that i'm going to ask  project leader for perkins will come up and just say a few words and introduce and this is true this right good evening everyone first let me say it's been quite a pleasure being in belmont you have an amazingly engaged community you have a great chairman of the committee who's very responsive a superintendent who is at every meeting and very interested in the process perkins  believe that i speak a little bit about the firm we have an eighty year legacy so we've been around for eighty years our first project was the crow island elementary school so i'm very proud of that because it's a k through twelve project i happen to be the case with twelve practice leader in the boston area we have twenty four hundred people at perkins and well one hundred fifty of those people reside in our boston office so we have a lot of resources and a lot of brains to have access to we our firm is centered around the research design and really as bill said have an interdisciplinary practice and what that means to you and i think that we always look back we try to remember when i say these things people look at me and say well what does that mean to me why is that wharton to belmont well what it means to you is that we have as bill said we have higher red we have i sometimes have to look it up because we have some between eight and ten practice areas so we have science and technology health care workplace corporate interiors we have hospitality city insights pre k through twelve and others so we have access to the research and innovation of those thought leaders in those areas so in science and technology we have someone an academic science who's looked working all around the world and seeing what those innovations are and we have someone in corporate science who seeing what's going on in the workplace so they can bring those practice areas and those things back to so in addition we talk about a research based resilience the human experience and these are researchers that are in our office that are collecting data taking information from other projects and bringing it back to the practitioners in the firm so what it means to belmont is that your project your high school can learn from not only what our practice areas are doing in the workplace and in their within their work but you can learn from our research and that's that's what's really important to you about our firm so we're very excited to hear i represent a very large team of people we have many many consultants and experts in every area discipline from traffic to mechanical to electrical to acoustics to fire protection the list is quite long and there's probably fifteen consultants at least in terms of the particular discipline and then many folks that work for those consultants so we're very happy to be here you are a great aspirational community and we share very similar values and that's why we were very excited when we were given this opportunity and we will work hard on your behalf and create a project that's  of your mission and your values in your community so thank you  you're here on board to it at this time but before brooke and her team could actually put paper a pencil pencil to paper and start creating designs we need to actually define what that project is and so john to come up now and talk about the district it's a roman issues how this feeds into our project and then some of the visions good evening everyone so this is a very exciting night we've been at this for a while as bill is stated it's really nice to be out in the public talking about some of the challenges we have and some of the exciting options that we have moving forward so i'm glad you're here tonight this is one of many nights it will be out talking to the community one of the start by saying that we've been looking at this work through two lenses one lens is what do we think is important for the teaching and learning of our students in our community over the next ten twenty thirty forty years in how do we construct a school around that around those characteristics around those models are on those educational values that's the first piece of what we want to do and we're lucky to partner with the s b a because they feel like that's the biggest piece that we should focus on and have the building be constructed around that so that's exciting the other part of the m s b is helping us on with the ability to explore three options which is great seven to twelve eight to twelve and nine through twelve is the big knowledge in that support of the community around exploring are increasing in roman and our space issues and to see if this project can solve any of those challenges so we'll call those operational challenges so with thankful to the state with thankful to the firms that we have hired in the building community because those three options make this work significantly more complex but i think when we have this opportunity as a community to engage with the state with this kind of funding reimbursement it makes a lot of sense to do so so going to walk you through a little bit of the educational vision work that we've done and where currently involved in and some of the operation in logistical challenges that we are facing this initial vision  work started last year last school year with two days of educational planning with our educators in an education facilitator and then we had one day of educational visioning with all teachers and administrators and then we had two days two full days of visioning work with community members parents guardians and students there were some nice takeaways that we had from those sessions first and foremost you know we talked about how do we want how do our students learn and how do we want to look at how we teach and engage students and some of the takeaways that we had from those sessions were projects based learning is something that people are interested in exploring social emotional learning which is a main component of the beaumont public schools current strategic plan should be a big piece of how we approach the teaching of learning in our schools thematic learning and also small group and student collaboration all of this is the takeaways from some of our first visioning sessions when we look at what does that mean for the educational delivery we started to look at what are some of the models that we would use and what does that look like more of a building or a classroom level well that means that we could employ the building based projects learning we could pilot innovative deliveries of instruction engagement with students we could create a school community that values flexibility and change these are all different characteristics that those groups came up with and these are the common themes of exciting instructional models that the belmont public schools like to explore and begin to push the edges on in the classroom while we think about what kind of building would like to build to work around these characteristics and these instructional models some key words around education the most commonly cited words over those five days were a collaborative authentic inquiry increase based and inquiry provocative project based learning integrated into disciplinary work with teachers evolving in adaptable engagement and again this was the words that were coming out most often over the course of the time that we work with our teachers and community members all of this work and all of these words begin to shape the guiding principles that will start to inform brooke and her team in tom and shane and their team to start to shape what the school could look like to build around these guiding principles keywords for the facilities they came up flexible flexible space flexible furniture flexibility for teachers and for students at the middle school flexible flexible flexible they want to be able to engage kids differently and they know our middle school population the students deserve that ability to interact in different types of classrooms high school flexible flexibility large spaces large learning spaces grouping small groups big groups bright open spaces and inspiring spaces and then we asked those folks at the end to summarize some of the big picture words that they would walk away with they want to share with us around the construction or the facilities in general was the fact that they wanted that facility to be flexible fluid and open and inspiring again these are words coming from our own community members and educators that will slowly begin to sift down into a  matic delivery document that we will provide the state and our group that we're working with to show exactly what we think our school could look like if we were able to engage kids at a high level so this is been very exciting work we had a day of visioning today we're calling it visioning session face to we had a full day at the high school today with seventy five members of our community students educators and community members we had expert presenters from steve turks who is with a consultant for  michael horn who is an amazing and engaging speaker today as well as david document from harvard school of ed all of whom spent time in many others stretching our thinking about teaching and learning talking about flipping the classroom talk about teaching outside talk about having no departments and flattening out how we organize our curriculum pushing the boundaries on why is homework important pushing the boundaries on social emotional learning in healthy schools the air in the school exercise breaks energy breaks inside the classroom physical education to music to core academic subjects all of those things were talked about today and there's a lot of learning happening in that room  at the end of the day we did a great feedback session with the folks broke out to groups and you can see that picture on your left we have people started to add identify characteristics and we'll take all that feedback and we have another date tomorrow this is all that kind of data collection that we're doing to try to get a sense of what this school could look like once important to our community and our educators and students and then continue to shape the vision of the belmont public schools that's it relates to not only the high school but also as it relates to potentially grade seven eight nine ten eleven twelve greatness so it's a very exciting conversation to have when we get to the second part of the work that we are viewing this this work through this lens is also had to talk about the operational elephant in the room we are getting bigger every day in terms of our enrollment as you can see from the chart behind me and this is the same chart we've used in the four years that i've been your superintendent that we started on october first of two thousand and eleven and we use our tobar one because that's the date that the state takes that number we had thirty nine hundred students we currently have forty five hundred forty students just six years later we have been averaging over one hundred students a year net new to the district not just one hundred new students that's actually more like two hundred eighty new families or new students because we have some folks leave and some folks commit  this year the unofficial number is one hundred thirty two but we have not even reached our total first yet so we assume that number will go up because we'll have new families move in and we assume that we probably will start to recognize some families who are not with us make calls and identify folks who did not start school with us so as you can see that will be a large increase in any one single year this in rome an increase over time has been solidified in the projections our demographic analysis group of kevin's associates in the m s p a in the short term what are we doing about it we've already have module classrooms at our high school and we've reconfigured a lot of space at the high school to make classrooms out of spaces that were not originally classrooms we have done the same thing at the general we've added six marginal classrooms on the tennis courts last year and we've also made classrooms out of rooms that were not traditionally classrooms and we will be hopefully adding with town meeting permission in the fall of this year for modular classrooms at the elementary level we are desperately seeking more space so we can add teachers to lower class size  to ensure that your child gets a quality education in an environment that's healthy and productive in engaging it with an appropriate class size when we talk about this project is really important to point out that we asked for three options because they do three different things for the district or they don't do three different things for the district so when you look at this chart on the left hand side you'll see nine through twelve eight through twelve and seven through twelve those are the a configuration options they provided us the ability to explore and when you look at the next column you'll see that if we do as we go across that one through twelve if we build a nine through twelve school we still have that elementary column that's an empty box that's not checked off because a nine to twelve school doesn't add any support to our elementary level challenges a nine to twelve school does not add any support to our challenges here at the  overcrowded in its five to a concurrent configuration so we say well can we explore eight through twelve and maybe add an eighth grade to the high school project which would be great that would give us a lot of relief here at the general as you can see by the checkmark in the middle box but it would not give us any relief at the elementary level and then lastly if we do a seven through twelve configuration you can see that it really does provide relief at the elementary level in relief at the middle school level and i will  know now that those configurations of k to three and four through six if in fact that option does become the one that the community chooses we could also impact those and find out of the other any other ways that we can figure out districts from the lower grade perspective that may serve our students better this is just the default organizational approach that we're taking until we find out the option that's ultimately chosen this school year so this leads to if you  do think about a seven through twelve school the first question is that we always get from the school project i was surprised bill didn't have in this f a q when will it be done my son is in third grade what does that mean to him what's the homeroom house going to get in the building what bus number twelve that would really have to talk about the careful connections that we can have educationally that will be valuable for us students and our teachers and also the careful separations that we need to keep in mind because you wouldn't want to school that big to have students fully integrated together you know you might not want your seventh grader in the same physics class as the twelfth grade or you might not want your eighth grader in the same nurse's office as an eleventh grader you know this definitely careful separations so you know after we unpack those careful separations and become safer with this idea that there may be separate entrances that there may be some she had spaces but some separated spaces and that the majority of my child's day will probably be different programming if i have a seventh or eighth grader versus i school or it makes you feel a little more relaxed to open up your brain waves to think about all the good things that can happen when you have that many educators in the same building and talking about teaching and learning in curriculum and programming that we can have for students seven through twelve i think it's a very exciting model i think eight to twelve is an exciting model both of those would really provide us more adults working together to ri provide a longer continuum of schooling and education engagement that i think would serve our students well by the time they graduated so when we look at things that could be separate at the middle school and high school core classrooms special education spaces media center learning commons food court and cafeteria same time use we might be able to share some things around certain specialized programming teacher planning centers and probably the food center but not the actual cafeteria obviously the custodial support will all be the same space separate time use these are some of the items that came up over our visioning work maybe the labs maybe the family and consumer education courses maybe those onetime offerings so we would actually really identify what would be middle school appropriate and separate what would be high school appropriate and separate and what can we actually gain by doing things together and what can we share so that would be an ongoing dialogue it will be a thoughtful one and it will be one that will keep the safety of your child in the forefront but also the educational extensions that we can make by having such unique service delivery this is not a new concept duxbury public schools in the south shore just built a seven through twelve school situate on the so sure which dateless projects did the work on is now a six through twelve school brooke worked on an eight through twelve school on the north shore and you actually you see many of your private prep schools are seven through twelve as well so we're excited about the possibility of seven through twelve and we're excited about eight through twelve in talking about any way we can engage students well around these kind of configurations so ironically we took a vote after we talked about this for two days with our community workshop we took a straw poll that we found really interesting and the results are on the back nobody voted for nine through twelve by the end of the second day which i thought was very interesting not even the high school staff that were on the on the on the agenda that day eight to twelve had four votes in twenty six votes were for the seven through twelve so it's really interesting that i think after we kind of get into on packing the value that we have not only from the educational visioning standpoint of getting teachers into the same roof engaging kids in a thoughtful way over a longer period of time the consistency in the culture of a bigger building but separate into smaller learning environments can bind with the common sense approach to one big project can really alleviate a lot of the town's challenges and now turning those into opportunities for belmont i think is a really exciting journey that we're on in where right now in the middle of that journey that we're moving it forward so that's the exciting part about the work so the next steps would be who makes a decision how does that work happen what happens between tonight and when these decisions are made bill has o lined the many meetings that we'll have with the community and gauging different folks at different times of the day and the night in the week in the weekend will continue to shape the vision work in will be providing the s b a with an educational program document that will outline why we think we need a new building and why we want certain types of spaces and why it's good for the teaching and learning of our students inside that conversation will be whether or not seven through twelve serves that well eight to twelve serves that well and one through twelve before we hand that over to the s b a our school committee will weigh in on that a cause that will be an educational decision and that's the body that governs that but the board of selectmen is the a body that signs every document that goes out to the s b a the belmont high school building committee is the governing body over the project in the m s b a is the one who is supporting the funding for the project so they will all have a certain amount of in have value in that conversation so at the end that will be a community decision that will make over the next four months and i think it's a big decision for the community i look forward to having those day to day conversations with parents and students like we did today and educators and with the overall community over the next few months so i'm glad that we have our school committee chair here today lisa fury and susan burgess cox also from the school committee  because the school committee will be working with this this piece of the project with the public in around these decisions around configuration so we're excited to be here bill and i hear the answer any question you have a and shane we have again provided a lot of the behind the scenes work over the last six to nine months and we're now ready to go live we're televising the event tonight we hope that you've been able to see some of the work that we've been doing over the last six months and we look forward to your questions tonight so thank you very much so at this time we could open it up the floor up for questions and we ask that you come down to the mike so we can actually get those questions heard and maybe just introduce yourself my name is  eight nine ten eleven twelve classes i just want to get a comparison sense of what is expect the capacity for the new building versus how many current students are there in that seven to talk range sure so i'll answer that question in two different one is the the enrollment design roman number that bill spoke of earlier only helps to start to start the building in the capacity grows from there and we won't know the capacity number until we finish the building because everything that we talk about regarding program in space through the educational program will help gain square footage if we have a thriving music program which we do and we have a thriving our program which we do and we can demonstrate a lot of enrollment in those areas the square footage will go up so the capacity of the building could could go up in conjunction with that educational program document so that that's where we're hoping to go in terms of our enrollment presently we have forty five hundred forty students in the district we reported that number out at our school committee meeting last week we're averaging about three hundred seventy students to three hundred sixty k to eight and we're averaging about three hundred forty students at the high school our high school went up by fifty eight students this year to over thirteen hundred thirty our middle school went up ninety students this year net there over fourteen hundred fifty and each of our elementary schools has seen an increase as well so all those numbers are on our website we posted the last week in every school committee meeting we post the exact enrollment of each one of our schools so that the public and can view that data so for example you gave three numbers you said the capacity for  seventy for nine through twelve as john said until we lay out the space we won't know what the total capacity is but i just did a quick math saying because i do that a lot and it seems that our capacity could be maybe in the nine hundred range if we were nine through twelve please don't quote me on that until we actually have layouts and square footage is but those are what we don't talk to passively we do actually talk designed enrollment because that's what we're charge to how we're charged to layout the space based on roman so i hope i hope i'm explaining that capacity and design realm are two different things we are active passive throughout our district john keeps saying that but when we design the building the numbers we're talking about are not capacity numbers correct so for seven through twelve our design and roman will be two thousand two hundred fifteen and our capacity may be somewhere north of two thousand five hundred so to me at a guess very quickly filled up or air out of space when wellington came beautiful building thinking others can be plenty of space very quickly if the old up and so that's my biggest concern is just that this new building is going to sell a very quickly you know boston's been rated number one everyone wants to move to boston is just keeps on growing so to me i don't think it's possible to be too big and i'm just concerned that very quickly so we have the same concerns in this t two pieces of that question maybe you would be helpful one is that the the m s b a once they said that number that number set so that that is a number that will have to work within the capacity will or rise and fall a little bit according to the programming like we said but we believe that we are well within an appropriate capacity the projections that we had from both the m s p and and became an associates continues to escalate to a certain point and then it levels off and we believe in this is again a projection we believe that that average class size will be about three fifty to three sixty per grade and if we see however a three sixty per grade remember now just about eight years ago we were about to sixty per grade so we have one hundred more students per grade across the whole district but once that flattens out and becomes a new watermark we believe the capacity of the district will be in place and we know there will have spikes of three eighty and we might have a couple of valleys of maybe three four days but we think that that average enrollment when it flattens back out again which would be a lot higher than than it was a few years ago that we will have the capacity across the district has remember as an example if we go seven through twelve that opens up space that each one of the elementary schools in opens up some room in the middle school as well so we believe that they'll be capacity in the district in where we only know the numbers in the projections that we're working with as well as anybody else with as much as  those numbers could shift in accelerate a little higher in ten years they could flatten out and go down as you mentioned earlier that's that's a pretty hard projection to make with all with one hundred percent certainty that evening my name is oscar nelson i have a third grader and eighth grader who probably will never see the new high school according to the timeline it's possibly premature but considering the numbers and considering that most likely to be no brainer to have actually seven to twelve i wanted to ask if you have any particular ideas about how we going to manage traffic and is there some is that something that you will possibly be thinking about maybe affording parents two exits and two entrances as opposed to what we have now because honestly when i think about seven to twelve i just went about shoot myself thinking about that the traffic on concord and how we  so these are questions we've already started asking ourselves can we fit a school of that size on this campus while it's active to we're not going to move them and make sure it works for not just the school and the students there but the neighborhood and the streets that feed into concord have and so forth so as you heard from perkins that well they've got many consultants one of the churches traffic we've already started a dialogue we've met with town officials they're collecting data and they will be synthesizing that that and figuring out how solutions can be put in place to allow that to happen and they need to present it to us and then we need as a community to weigh in on it we don't know what that solutions going to be we don't know what the traffic solution will be two entrances in and out has been suggested as you know even from our police ok they know the issues so we've had a great engagement with the with the with the regulatory people here in belmont including police and we will be continuing that discussion all of that's going to happen between now and early part of next year because we will not make a decision we hope without turning over all the rocks and looking at every option and making sure that we've convinced ourselves as a community that this is the right solution may i just have one follow up you certainly know is there any realistic expectations that we can actually have enough land for possibly two exits and two entrances or is that something that will have to be extremely creative in terms of constraints i love that we're creative because i keep reminding my architect that  they need to be extremely creative in belmont and look at solutions that they probably haven't explored before so yes we will be looking at whatever creative solutions can give us safe and good traffic in and around  into the school campus and there's no options to any other way than what we have already i think it would be very hard to talk to the beattie about moving the track so i think we're stuck there i mean maybe on the past we'd be talked about it on and off for years but apparently of what the m s b a is currently thinking about net zero energy buildings i think it's becoming obvious that more states are starting to think about including that in their policies on energy and buildings and i don't want our new school to be behind before it's even finished so you're asking about what the m s b requires as a baseline for energy not a requirement in terms of what they're envisioning i mean what sort of support do they have for the idea zero energy building i think the the actual requirements on paper might be a little bit behind the thinking so i know your question thank you that's a great question i was hoping it was coming up because i saw someone else that might ask it today and so in the  process of selecting an architect delmon asked and we explained to the the the designers that we're looking at this that we want to explore net zero as a solution that's not a requirement for the a but we want to look at that as a solution that doesn't mean that that's that's a goal we expect to achieve but we certainly want to bet that what is net zero net zero is is a name that's giving now to projects where the building energy that's used and i hope i'm saying this right is is not exceeding that what it's what it can produce i did a good job sounds like you're you know all about it and we want as far as to say maybe we want to look at net positive ok so we're going to push that limit it doesn't mean that will get there there's a lot of factors it's a big building and so forth but our firm perkins will has design zero facilities they are in the process of doing that again and they look for creative ways in that was one of the things during their interview process that they demonstrated to us that they have the horsepower in the knowledge to show us what can be done it's really good to hear and i have been on the web site and seen some good news in that front i would urge you to start thinking about the main objections that you might see to it which is basically any incremental cap up front capital costs we all know that it's much cheaper to operate over the long run over the long lifecycle of the building and i know that costs are coming down for designing that sort of building but i think a lot of people aren't yet aware of how cost effective it really is and it's not just bricks and mortar it's it's the way the building is operated the way people use the building it's it's a lifestyle and we're looking forward to talking about that think my name's amy brown my son just entered generally so very excited because he will be part of the new school i hope and i just want to thank you and the committee for your time and dedication this is a long standing project and we really really fresh air your input speaking of input my question is will you provide the community an opportunity to provide input on the design of the building absolutely so is one in which we expect to engage that we go we expect to engage the community as the design it's progressing so what does that mean that means that today we're talking about vision and what you know the  program when we meet at the beach street center will probably having results of what that visioning is and how that might influence in the square footage of the program we get into october and november and december we're really going to be talking of will have we actually have a large physical model but it's very cumbersome to bring it so we'll be talking about the model and what that looks like and how it fits on the site we talking about the adjacencies and john will be talking about how the program could fit with a seven through twelve and how  t flow through the building so there will be opportunity we expect that the belmont community wants to see that and we want to hear their their comments thank you and just one more concern you don't have to answer the question but during the transition process while it's all under construction i just want to express my concern that it will all be wheelchair accessible modulars make things challenging going in and out of buildings during nasty weather is just something that i know you have at least two folks who will be in that high school in wheelchairs so it's definitely something to consider during the process thank you  you i my name is mary lewis i have a second and fourth grader and i had the pleasure of participating in the visioning workshop in the spring which was really exciting one of the things that i came away from that feeling was that four five six is a much more pedagogically and developmentally sound grouping then five through eight i went into the meeting thinking no way would i ever want to put seventh graders at the high school so i came away definitely converted to this configuration but my question is what that means for the kids at ten arena and i realize this isn't a question  building committee but more for mr failand on the have nine year olds go to a school with twelve hundred students is a pretty frightening prospect of twelve hundred at a minimum i would guess and so i'm just wondering what the plans are for the chan or any in terms of knowing don't have a lot of money but of reconfiguring what  our very rigid space that we have here how we can teach the fourth fifth and sixth graders who you know it's already with their at mit at elementary schools that are pushing five hundred or more students which is big and the thought of young children being in an environment that i certainly didn't encounter until seventh grade and i'm sure many of us share that  just wonder what you what your plans are i realize it's not a building committee question thank you mary references the great exercise we did when we talked we put every grade  two three four all the way to twelve and we talked about which grades had the most in common with each other and that's kind of where we started to think about maybe nine in ninth grade is more like an eighth grader than a tenth grader and we sort of the talk about the age of the students in where they are in their maturity and the psychology behind learners as they go through the ages and so it is good to know that that configuration of four five six was one that we felt comfortable with as it relates to generally what we're probably thinking about three hundred fifty per grade three sixty that will be the new watermark that will say so it gives about a thousand students a little over a thousand five in right now the wellington is  t six hundred so it's a big building in wellington is the bigger building my my goal would be to model some of the visioning work they're doing now where we're placing a lot of value on schools within schools groups within grades smaller learning communities that could make that work we have not dug into that deeply yet because we don't know if we have to go there yet we really want to see where we end with this configuration conversation before we start to really put more brainpower behind what do we do with do we do four k to threes which would be all of our elementary and then have a four through six to use all five of those buildings to address that population in general there's a lot of good conversation to be held there one of the reasons why you openly say i'm not sure about making them five elementary schools is because this would be the biggest facility and no matter who landed here would end up having a bigger facility  just andrus i teach fourth grade at the wellington school and i've worked in the belmont public schools for ten years and i had a very similar questions as the one that just went before me but as a follow up what is the timeline like for if the vote passes first seven to twelve will what's the timeline for the visioning and making a decision and how would a decision be made on the configuration for the rest of the elementary and middle school i would give us about a year  start that conversation would have to finish this academic year ensure ensure that we're on time with our m s p a project would have to reassess our buildings that we have to see what needs to be reconfigured what needed maybe financial support to reconfigure and have a conversation with the with our educators in our community about great configuration for the elementary grades so similar to what we're doing now for the upper level of the district we would do at the with the community probably not as as big of a magnitude but we would ask those questions and have that dialogue with the community as well and would it be voted on or would it be a decision made by the ministration i don't know the it's a question thank you good question and i'd like to think we have four three fourth grade teachers in the audience so thank you very much for coming in that's the reason why our role was going up was because we have great fourth grade teachers bonnie friedman town meeting member member of the league of women voters some kids in my house went to the high school and currently have a grandson in the high school i totally get k through three i happened to go to a school that was k through three four through six seems reasonable eight seemed great for the kids in my house what i'm really concerned and i just don't hear it being said the same way is that seven through twelve seems to be still driven mostly by the numbers and not  what the kids are like and what they're exposed to and maybe it's because of my own experiences but this is nabi something that most people don't want to hear but there's a lot more drugs and alcohol in the high school and when i was in high school that really affected my seventh and eighth grade years i was in a school that had high school as well it was really tiny everybody thinks you go to private school and you're protected by seventh grade kids the kids in my seventh grade were exposed to pot from the campus and smoked it on the school grounds in eighth grade they were exposed to l s d in the school during the day i've seen  the high schoolers encourage younger kids in town i am not comfortable with seventh and eighth graders being on the same premises and a separate door doesn't solve that to me and i just don't hear this being discussed and i'm worried about it so i will gladly discuss that as a parent of five children and for the middle school principal and someone who believes that providing a safe school environment for all children is super important  none of that is acceptable to me so whether it's seventh grade or twelfth grade it's not acceptable in the way that that we could build a building to help facilitate that not being acceptable is the camp of separations and the cable connections so when we talk about just two doors i think we really should talk about the middle school model or the middle school grades being serviced in a very different way in a very different place then are ten through twelve students as an example when they walk together at the beginning of the day or the end of the day a b different start times a child can walk down from general now and meet his buddy at the tennis courts or at the end it would pool or at starbucks they you probably know high school student and you could meet them in three minutes if you wanted to so during the day the educational value that we would place on our younger graded students and how we would make sure that that was separated carefully with our older students would be a really big priority we know that that's an issue for folks and we feel i feel very confident being able to do that and my my worry is the space big enough not really is the educational programming going to be good enough in is what is whether or not the safety of our children is going to be good enough i believe the safety will be top notch i believe the the administrators that we have will will work with students and families we have a great relationship with our dear officer and our  officer in the community that we work with so i feel confident that we could do that part of the work very well yes charles my hog i have a fifth grader and a tenth  grader my question had to do more with the end of the a's role in funding i heard like a thirty six percent number bandied around and that some things apply and some things don't freeze have a couple examples of what those kinds of things are and then is that is the a cap a dollar cap to their funding and is that influenced by the seventh and twelfth grade option versus the one thousand twelfth cetera and then does any of that money go to restructuring of the middle and and grade schools if we go to seven to twelve option those are great questions and i hope i can answer maybe want to stay there in case i missed one so the m s b a has entered into agreement with  an agreement to fund thirty six point eight nine percent of eligible costs for the feasibility study we reach an agreement for a new school solution one tear into our project funding agreement that percentage won't go down there are incentive points that we work towards in the next year during this process with them and so it's possible it's possible to go up slightly it won't go up fifteen points maybe a couple of  points so we'll probably be hovering just under forty percent of eligible costs you said what you know there's a there's a long definition i won't get into it tonight but you asked for a couple of explanations a couple of examples of what that means so eligible cost say on site improvements would be kept on a percentage of the construction costs and i believe that number is eight percent ok which means that if we spend x amount of dollars on the building the construction costs the site allowance that they'll contribute towards and i could give as a percent are going to contribute towards would be eight percent and then of that eight percent it's the thirty six point eight percent say ok another example would be that we have a pool and it's used a lot but i must be a does not support buildings with pools we have an understanding with them an agreement that we can keep the pool where it is improve conditioning life safety fire alarms that sort of thing would be done but if we move it we cannot bring a school pool back so that's that's something we have to look at there those are there you can't bring it back or we would pay for it completely independen not be part of this project we can outline something and say in the future but it will not be part of this project there are some so collation of construction costs and school costs are a big issue with the s b a they told us that and they're trying to rein it in it's not that it's not because  belmont other communities just the way the market is right now so so they have to be fair to everyone another example is our field house we have a fantastic field house but in the m s b a program a facility like that is not possible in  the square footage allocation for high school it would be much smaller probably half that size so it's maybe something that we want to keep and they will participate with us in improving that as far as ventilation life safety and that sort of thing lighting so so those are some examples and we can go on and on but they have rules that we have to follow now is there a limit to what the you know in other words thirty six point eight nine doesn't stop at a limit when we enter a project funding agreement the cost of construction will be known as far as what our estimates are and so there will be a limit that they put on but we do based on the percentage so that percentage won't go down just because the construction costs are going up i hope that answers your question i don't know what the cap will be it will be  when we know what the construction cost is so we establish the construction cap and they agree to whether they accepted at the at the same percentage of eligible costs there are in this together with us john explained we one of our first meetings we were poor we pushed hard on a district issue our high schools nine through twelve what if we did eight through twelve and they said ok so then we said well what if we did seven through twelve so every time we brought that in they knew they were going to be laying out more money but they agreed to th net percent of whatever the town's willing to pony up more or less eligible costs and then the costs down hill for grade and no that's right i'm glad you're here so our project with the m s b a is a high school project on that campus what happens beyond that campus is borne by belmont a hundred percent so there are costs beyond this to achieve the goals that we're setting in terms of the rest of the grades down below seven if there is what if we just would if everybody thinks or the town wants to do nine to twelve the m s b a will fund the percentage of a nine to twelve building the building committee will be directed to to build that building in connection with the design m so who pays for the work that would have to happen at the middle school or at the elementary level how does that work happen is that another m s p a project do we have to write another application do we have to wait another thirteen years that is that is that would become the town's next i challenge so which makes you know that seven to twelve conversation all that much more important because if we choose eight to twelve or nine to twelve we have a whole nother set of work to do that would be pretty much on what could be possibly without the m s b h partnership because we may not be able to wait that long  have a project take place so that the alternative cost to have some was he's the number for seven to twelve and says oh my gosh that's a big building that's a lot of money you have to compare that to if you did nine to twelve and you had to go out and pay on your own for the solution to the elementary or the middle school level challenges that we have so there's going to be a lot of comparison analysis that will take place financially as it relates to the options as  well bob singular so inroad ask you about remediation you might have addressed this a little but what do you dissipate in a way of hazardous waste removal either in the ground or in the current structure and how do you budget for that if you can so what you're referring to probably is a pretty well known issue right now in the high school is that there's a specificity of the ceiling tiles protecting the steel with fire in the fire proofing and that the building was constructed in  hundred sixty s on the town dump so so both of those are enviro environmental issues and we have a separate budget within our feasibility study right now to explore what that means and then to quantify what it means to deal with it because we must deal with we don't know what that is yet but we just hired a very reputable geo environmental firm so they are just technical engineering and environmental engineering they have experience and site improvements or license i professionals so they know how to deal with this and they will be working with with our design teams to look at what the potential solutions are as we present them and what the impacts would be to the site from an environmental issue i'm glad to hear you're going to keep the swimming pool because i use it quite often  belmont for about five years and i have a third grader and a fifth grader now and i'm prefacing this question because i'm asking it out of more or less ignorance and curiosity and that generally my ideas are bad ideas but through the m process is it required that the existing high school get knocked down could you build a separate building on the site and not knock down what's there and use that as different solutions so i could ten through twelve seven through nine separate things but have a campus there and that so that's a great question and we actually will be looking at that as a potential solution other words how do we retain the building it's going to need to be fixed up on a lot of a lot of ways and then add to it to facilitate the total solution whether it's nine through twelve a through twelve or seven to twelve because it allows you to keep the field house the pool and all those other things that might not be allowed allowable expenses we definitely will be looking at i will say this that very often in our design professionals said this and if you look around the state you see a lot of schools that are new and renovated because construction costs often really go high on a renovation project but we need to look at that and we need to make sure that we've addressed that and cross it out properly and because those questions are important in this day requires us to do that so we'll be looking  at fred paulson tommy member just one small comment initially i think you mentioned that there was is a new building that is seven through twelve that was recently constructed and my question is will the building committee have the opportunity to visit some of these new schools as we get into the design stage so i have to say that i've already toured four schools and i'm so excited what these new schools look like when i say new they're not always new new they could be renovation new addition and as a matter of fact i think there's five on our list now that we've already done in this early stage and it's so inspiring to see what this will look like not just like that but how it turns out and so yes we've looked at these schools john as just referenced scituate that have six six through twelve and so we probably will be looking at more as we move on to look at examples but in this early stage before we even had our design team we've already chalked up for tours the major question that i have is the size of the site which i think was talked about and that involves packing and it involves what happens to the athletic fields and i think there are other things that bear on that because as i think you know th about the size of the parking and i guess i would urge that we don't magnify the packing aspect but also rely upon the bussing in the walking to school i think biking to school so that we don't subtract a lot of space around the high school building thank you i don't know if there's a comment there that i can give but i was familiar what happened with the wellington and i could say that there are a lot of interests for instance the neighborhood would like to see no cars in the neighborhood so they want to make sure parking just like wellington was on site the athletic folks want to make sure that all fields are preserved there's nothing that's expendable i think that kind of said that this week we have a program that needs to grow in square footage if even if we're nine through twelve we've asked our design team to start looking at a building that might be taller than the current two stories there's owning issues with that that we have to work through so there's a lot of variables and this is no simple process our team knew that before they came to us and said we'd like to be part of your team and we're going to challenge them with all of these variables even even to the extent that where do you position this building on campus and where is it most appropriate that's a very the last question i have relates to and i forget what these what the standard is but to meet environmental standards  building there are certain requirements in terms of how the how the glass the glasses and how the heating system works in a conditioning and so forth and  guess my question is in terms of those standards which you have to meet and take into account is that something that has some flexibility how does that work so there are building codes that we need need to meet then there are objectives that we may like to have the nice things to have i don't know if i'm going to answer your question so we start with the building code as far as what the ventilation requirements are with the lighting requirements are  here requirements are and if if there is air condition in some of spaces what those need to be we talk about what we may like to have but we have to evaluate how those costs play out i'm not sure if i was right i think you an wanted to reach a standard environmentally there are certain things you have to do are you are you going back to something like zero net energy things like that yes so we'll be exploring that and how and how that influences how we're eating the building our cooling the some of the spaces that require cooling there are there are advantages to siting the building obviously if we kept the building where it is today we're kind of stuck with the siding but if we're looking at a new building i expect that  design team because they have such great research would be looking at the orientation of the building to benefit from minimize the solar impact but also gain good lighting so all of those play into this the design and there are groups in belmont sustainable belmont that are looking at those issues and i would expect that the some coordination between some of those groups and the building committee we are always open to discussion  you i roger cult and attend meeting member from precinct six i have three somewhat unrelated questions would you like them one at a time or you run me i didn't do very good last time when they all came at once so maybe you could do one of the time ok so my first question that these questions really come from my stakeholder status as a town meeting member over the last couple years we clearly have had a lot of discussions about vocational education in belmont is expanding the ability to offer vocational education at down my high so we can bring back some of those kids and not have to pay to send them out of district every year on the agenda or is the space just so tight that that's a silly  question it's certainly not a silly question because we think the vocational experience of students is really important i think the vocational experiences is kind of morphed more to a stem and steam and a different conversation does it does that does not require a full woodshop or a full auto shop so we have not explored that kind of traditional vocational components of the new school however we would want to consider all of those stem science math coding robotics in those those kind of related fields in programming in a new building and because we believe that we will have a subscribership in and excitement about that they could fill those classrooms and make it worth our while the reason why regional schools are actually in place is because most school districts only have a certain amount of students and therefore the space that they build to provide that service to students is not is not efficient so they sent him to a regional school district so as we do with our regional partners and special education as we do or have done with our regional partners with minuteman we would probably have those vocational program offerings remain outside the high school project ok number two is on occasion people talk about the fact that we have our high school campus but there marginal what i would call marginal properties on the edges of the campus that some folks including myself think the town should be thinking about owning would the acquisition of the cambridge plating or the mobile oil station affect the deliberations of the building committee on what you have space to do or does that just take us off into a tangent that  get involved with those those conversations have occurred we are we are tasked with working the campus site that we have and to meet our schedule we would not be able to go through a land acquisition process with someone that really hasn't been too forthcoming in returning phone calls in the past so i would say that at this point we are a set campus that you see today if those opportunities present themselves in the future there's may be extra fields that may come back or something like that but right now the campus is the campus i will say that it includes the town did purchase a couple of homes and knocked those down right on the concord of and so that that's a benefit to our campus so the cambridge played ings in the mobile oils where it might affect what i think i just heard you say what might affect future fields but it will have no impact on the type of building or the size of the building that you folks are working on that's absolutely a true statement we need to we need to go to the m s b a with with proof of title shipper process that doesn't exist today so we would hold up our project if we want to ok and finally there is  discussion that you've presented tonight about the five through seven or eight through seven through twelve eight through twelve i'll get this right through twelve nine through twelve do those decisions have a life span is it the life span of the building or is that a fifteen year decision that gets revisited every ten years or every fifteen years or every twenty years did that question make sense i don't think i've ever heard that question before so just going to walk over and take  a i would i would probably ask the building committee in our team to talk to the m s p a bout that because it my experience with the m s p is once you build a building for a certain grade set for a certain purpose you would have to occupy it in that in that way for a period of time so that's my generally answer in terms from an educational profile i'm sure the school committee could always entertain changing how they would like to configure reconfigure the district at any time but it's certainly not a process that anybody would take lightly and do anytime soon but i think the actual occupying of the building when you engage the m s b a under a certain set of great configurations understandings would be part of the deal we would have with you i my name is sarah jensen i have two kids in the belmont district a third grader and a sixth grader my third grader is in the lab program and she is currently in a classroom in burlington i creating more lab classrooms here so that we can bring our kids back into town absolutely i am on the lab board as your superintendent i serve on the lab board the lab program is in desperate need of middle school space in particular so any space that we would gain by the seven to twelve we would certainly make available to not only lab programming but maybe even internal programming that we might be able to have that's belmont public school programming to bring some of our students back to their to their home schools we also have flexibility with the m s b a that in whatever new building we build that we can insert a special education programming document to them to show that we are part of a collaborative which they know and that there may be some spaces that we want to add on top of that for special education that we might be able to bring more students back to our to our home districts so special education is a very big component of this conversation around educational programming in general in the lab who is a great partner by the way the belmont public schools will have a seat at that table as well bill just remind me when we talk about enrollment in design enrollment which then leads to that big number of capacity and s b a does not include special education numbers in that because they want to let you customize those spaces and they don't restrict you on that design room and so they give us flexibility around special education which is a good news story for the district in the programs that we that we serve are there any other  every which hopefully will stay where it is is there any sort of playroom in figuring out if he maybe want to skip of some space and high school so we can do maybe more on the town side of the required any way shape or form to all have certain space so and i'm not against libraries don't get me wrong and actually we have a fabulous library we asked the m s b if we could consider the library pargeter project or the town library miss wright  and so that can't be is so we can't agree that there are space the space summary does include space for a library what that means in the the high school is still yet to be defined that came up actually today in our visioning and we still need to talk the educators are going to be talking about that because libraries have changed right so you know especially in the schools so we'll have to see what that means but the libraries a library type thing where people are giving or getting information or sharing information doesn't it wouldn't be going away from the school it's just what that looks like we don't know yet but we do not have any actual requirements for space or size they will not ask us to do a certain amount of space maybe we want need all the might need more that's what i'm also going that's a very good question so we will have space in the space summary for some type of library but it probably won't be the traditional volumes that you see in stacks so we'll be populating that with something different that answer a question thank you  thank you very much i want to thank john for working with me here tonight this is great feedback we have several more as you could see here of these types and each one will be different will be building upon that we have other venues where you could discuss with us what's going on school committee meetings jobby talking about this that and then we have our building committee meetings as well we're trying to televise everything certainly this is recorded we have a web site and we have information on there and other things that will be keeping current there were flyers out there hopefully you got that and that's where you can keep your communications current with us we respond to questions i got one today so we'll be getting response out on that one as well so thanks again for joining us have a good night