Infrastructure woes: Tours give community look at schools’ condition

By Mary Owen

Did you know that only 140 of Stayton High School’s 800 students can sit in the cafeteria at one time? So where do the others eat?

“Check out the hallways, the auditorium foyer, outside along the wall, and on the stairway to the upper science classrooms,” said Superintendent Jack Adams. “That’s where you’ll find them.”

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Stayton High’s problem is only magnified at other North Santiam School District schools. Stayton Elementary School’s 485 students have no cafeteria seating, so about 85 at a time are served in the gym. The equivalent of 17 instructional days have been saved by not eating in the classrooms, but it disrupts physical education classes, according to district officials.

Sublimity School has eight lunch periods, and serves lunch in the basement below its gymnasium. Noise and shaking light fixtures accompany students as they eat. Several people on a recent tour of the building noted how much noise there was above the kids while they are trying to eat, it was especially bad during bowling practice.

Mari-Linn School has five lunch periods each day due to space limitations, and some classes are interrupted to serve students a mid-morning snack due to lunch being served so late.

Additionally, the school lacks kitchen space to prepare foods and refrigeration units, freezers and ventilations systems are all located in the cafeteria area.

The solution: Build multi-purpose cafeterias with enough space to serve larger groups of students, allowing more teaching time while providing a large enough space for community and other school events. That’s the message NSSD handed out via flyers to those who attended SummerFest, in hopes that by educating voters about the shortages, they might just put their “X” next to the “yes” box for the $44.9 million bond measure on the ballot for the Nov. 4 general election.

Several concerned community members have been driving home that message via letters to local newspapers.

“I think that people are ready to stand up and put their children’s education and the spaces where students spend seven hours of their day as a priority in their own budgets” said Mary Richards, the school board’s executive secretary, who as a private citizen, has written several letters urging people to vote.

Several members of the NSSD Bond Advisory Committee have been writing letters to the editor, and Richards noted that their “eyes were really opened to the needs of students as they reviewed
information and went on tours of each of the buildings in the District.”

Their thrust is that NSSD students “deserve safe schools, updated equipment and facilities, classrooms and libraries with current technology, and adequate cafeterias and locker rooms.
“Did you know that … students need access to technology to be competitive in the workforce?” was a sample question for those who picked up the flyers. Many NSSD schools lack Internet access in their libraries which is required for the most up-to-date information available for research, projects and assignments. Current classroom lab spaces are inadequate and need updated wiring, school officials reported.

Also hammered out was data on the last time Lyons, Mehama or Sublimity invested in new schools, which was in the 1940s and early 1950s due to post-World War II growth.
Due to space issues, the Stayton community built its middle school in 1970. In the mid-1990s, before consolidation, a small bond was passed to pay for building expansions at three sites, including classrooms for grade 5 at Stayton Middle School. Currently, the District has 22 classrooms that are taught out of modular buildings.

“The time has come to add classrooms and confidential spaces at four sites,” Adams said. “We cannot wait any longer. The board would like to offer all-day kindergarten, but cannot even consider it as an option due to inadequate classroom space”.

By expanding Stayton Elementary School and moving fourth and fifth grades back to the elementary school, all five NSSD sites will have classroom spaces for expanded growth, District officials said.

Without change, NSSD will have to continue to meet the increasing costs of aged and inefficient buildings that are a substantial drain on the District’s general fund. Over the past five years, the District has been using the Resource Conservation Measures Program, which builds upon successful energy conservation retrofits necessary to keep operating costs down. The RCM provides site-based incentives for savings, which can be reinvested into new cost reduction measures, further reducing expenditures. These measures have cost/benefit limitations due to the age of each building’s systems and infrastructure.

Other needs addressed in the bond measure include: strong security systems for student and community safety; additional classroom spaces to alleviate overcrowding and provide for growth, as well as for integrating all-day kindergarten into the district’s offerings; additional gym and locker room space at the high school; a fine arts building for music and drama, serving both school and community needs; and continued upgrades to infrastructure in the areas of lighting, heating and roofing.

Voters will decide the fate of the bond measure on the Nov. 4 ballot.