By Eli OkunUnion Leader Correspondent
WINDHAM – The town’s extensive process of renovating, expanding and reshuffling its schools took a step further with the exhibition of initial plans at a community forum Wednesday night.But several of the roughly two dozen residents in attendance at the Windham High School event voiced deep concern about the schools’ ability to accommodate a much larger student body in this quickly growing town.Ingrid Nichols and Brad Prescott of Banwell Architects laid out a variety of initial conceptual site plans and layouts for Golden Brook School — where the roughly 500-student current building is expected to house about 1,000 students after an expansion — and Windham Middle School.Windham schools have been grappling with overcrowding at all levels for several years. The new Windham High School was built in 2009, but the lower grades are still spilling out of their current schools. The preschool and third grade classes are currently housed at the high school.“The reality is, our overcrowding impacts every single one of our schools,” said interim superintendent Tina McCoy at the meeting’s outset, “and it will continue to impact our schools in the next few years and even more.”Under the plans, the delineation of grades at different schools would shift. Golden Brook would house pre-kindergarten through fourth grade, Windham Center School would house fifth and sixth grade, and Windham Middle would have seventh and eighth grade.The architects have spent several days meeting with various staff groups and stakeholders in the schools to listen to their needs and desires, as well as coordinating with the school board and buildings and grounds committee.Wednesday night’s meeting was the first of several opportunities for the public to engage with the plans, which will go through many more rounds of refinement, selection and cost estimation through the end of the year. That will include another community forum in November, Nichols said. She added that the architects hope to have a website up soon with all the plans and their notes from meeting with school employees.Nichols and Prescott laid out two different options for the renovation of Golden Brook — a two-story building and a three-story building, each of which would incorporate some different configurations of rooms. Architects are trying to keep individual grades together in “houses.” School faculty generally preferred the two-story plan, they said.Nichols said the work, if approved by voters, could start next summer and would likely take 1.5 to two years.Plans for Golden Brook could include — among other things — additional playgrounds, septic system upgrades, changes to the drop-off and bus routes, 100 new parking spaces, a second gym, and various expansions and alterations of classroom space.Many parents and residents stepped forward at the public forum to express worries about the strains of a growing student body, even on an expanded school. They said that given current numbers and trends, the school could be educating more than 1,000 students in pre-K through fourth grade by the time it opens — and that it could reach its maximum capacity of 1,250 shortly thereafter.Too many students could not only push classroom sizes up to the state-mandated limit of 25 kids, they said, but could also put strains on traffic patterns, drop-off lines, school resources and emergency plans.Betty Dunn said she had seen Windham bump up against overcrowding problems for decades, and that recent housing trends will translate to a surge of students. “I am still tremendously concerned about this many young, young students — that this just begins to feel like such a large-scale operation that it loses what we have had and what we valued in this town for many, many years,” she said.After many questions and much debate about Golden Brook, the architects also laid out some plans for Windham Middle, which will require fewer changes and which they started working on more recently.There, too, the architects offered two different options. One entails mostly minor renovations, like expanding rooms to have four full science labs. The other would add an addition to the rear to allow for new curricular offerings: tech education and family and consumer science, as well as possibly a STEM or STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art and math) program.The prospect of adding what used to be known as woodshop and home economics drew several comments, mostly positive, from residents. But the middle school area of greatest concern would be addressed under either plan: eliminating the carts.Currently, due to space constraints, eight teachers in the school work off carts — mobile units that they transport between classes, since they don’t have their own classrooms. Though the architects’ plans would still include a couple of shared classrooms, the carts would be finished.That would likely satisfy many of the people in attendance Wednesday. “If a plan comes forth that does not get teachers off the carts and solve the problems, I will not vote for it,” one declared to general applause.Despite the thorough and passionate questioning, multiple residents said afterward that they were satisfied with the architects’ answers and clarity. The process still has a long way to go, regardless.“What we see here is a lot of earnest and sincere people trying to figure out what’s best for their community in a very constructive way,” Prescott told the Union Leader.
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