The York County School Division is moving ahead in the design process for its newest elementary school.
The preliminary design phase for the school is complete, said Katherine Goff, the school district’s public relations and communications officer. A schematic floor plan has been developed but will need to be reviewed by a design committee and central office staff before being approved.
Architectural conceptual designs and topographical surveys have been completed, and the next phase will build on the preliminary designs.
A design committee will work with contractors to design the school based on the preliminary floor plan. The School Board and the county’s Board of Supervisors have jointly agreed to set aside more than $365,000 to fund the phase of the design work.
The school, which has not yet been named, will be built near the Marquis Shopping Center on Route 199 near Water Country USA, and the design process is expected to cost around $2 million total.
“The schools have accepted a footprint for the school and now they’re doing more detailed design,” County Administrator Neil Morgan said. “What would the actual dimensions of hallways and classrooms and cafeteria be? What kind of utility service would you need?”
The need for a new school
The school will initially have room for 500 students, Goff said, with the potential to expand to hold an additional 200. It will sit next to a planned residential development that may consist of about 600 apartments and around 180 single-family homes.
Residential developments such as the Marquis are one the main reasons a new school is needed, Morgan said. As families move into new developments, the school division will need the elementary school to open to prevent overcrowding in existing schools.
“The new elementary school has been part of the capital improvement program for several years to address existing building capacity, proposed residential developments and elementary enrollment trends,” Goff said in an email to WYDaily.
The Marquis development is in the attendance zone for Magruder Elementary, which was approaching maximum capacity in 2015. The potential for overcrowding has been a topic among the school board for years.
Capacity is evaluated annually, Goff said, and is based on 30-day enrollment counts and year-to-year changes in the use of classrooms. A capacity evaluation will be presented to the School Board at a November work session.
Morgan and Goff said the county and school board are monitoring the Marquis residential development and others throughout the upper end of the county to determine when the new school will need to be operational.
However, residents shouldn’t expect to hear the school bell ring any time soon.
“We all believe we’ll need another elementary school, but whether that need emerges in two years, four years or six years is what remains to be seen,” Morgan said.
Neither a date for the completion of the design work not the beginning of construction has been set, Goff said. Funding for the construction in the sum of $23 million is set aside in the School Board’s capital improvement program for fiscal years 2019 through 2024.
Goff said the funding has been included in the CIP for multiple years, and the project has been moved back as the pace of residential developments has been slower than originally forecast.
‘Not under immediate pressure’
The design is being conducted in four phases, Morgan said. Just as the design development phase will build on the preliminary design work, the construction document phase will build on designs and lay out a plan for construction.
Once those documents are completed and approved then construction can begin.
“Designing it over a period of quite some time, they’re not under immediate pressure of space requirements, so they have the luxury of going slow and reviewing at each increment,” Morgan said.
Morgan said the School Board and the Board of Supervisors will approve funding as each phase of the process begins.
The design work is being funded through the county’s Revenue Stabilization Reserve Fund in the sum of $365,460. The fund is jointly used by the county and school division as a rainy day fund in the event federal education aid is cut.
Morgan said because the fund currently has a balance of more than $7 million, both parties agreed to use the fund for the school’s design.
The Board of Supervisors approved a transfer of $365,460 from the reserve fund to the school division’s capital projects fund for the second phase of design work on the school in August. The school board did the same in June.
The funding will be used to purchase engineering and architectural services for the school’s design.
Morgan added that unlike the design work, the $23 million construction cost of the school will likely be funded through loans.
