After six years of debate, plans can change
Published 8:00 am Wednesday, April 11, 2007
The money is there, now let’s hash out the plan for the space, officials from Spectrum and the North Kitsap School District Superintendent’s office said to each other when the 2001 capital programs bond was approved by voters.
Providing for multiple school remodernization projects as well as the construction of a roughly $37.5 million high school in Kingston, the bond projects list also included $600,000 for an “addition to Spectrum Community School,” it stated.
The board received the recommendation near the project deadline, affirmed it with a community survey and added Spectrum’s project — without many other specifics — to the bond.
Then, during the course of more than six years of debate and planning between the alternative school community, the district office, architects and citizen committees, the “addition” at Spectrum took on many different meanings from various viewpoints.
Curious as to just what was promised to Spectrum through the bond, the North Kitsap Herald submitted a public records request concerning how the original cost estimate arose. According to the district, the amount came in the form of a hypothesis from NKSD-contract architect Bob Harthorne at a school board study session before the bond’s approval in November 2000. Though there is no documentation available from the meeting, Harthorne told NKSD public relations director Chris Case that he remembers being presented with a stand-alone building design that had been created by Spectrum community members and asked if $600,000 would be sufficient.
The public records request states that at the meeting he felt that while the design presented couldn’t be built for that amount, a 3,000-square-foot bare bones structure could, at the construction cost of $200 per square foot.
But those were rough estimates from 2000 and included neither inflation nor overhead costs associated with regard to design and project management.
As the construction of the other bond projects took root, discussions between the Capital Facilities Advisory Committee — the group overseeing the bond projects’ construction — the North Kitsap School District and the Spectrum community carried on concerning what form Spectrum’s “addition” would take.
The project’s definition began as an additional meeting space/performance venue for Spectrum’s then average 130-member student body. Cost estimates for two options for the project were documented in a January 2001 list of all bond item estimates. Option 1 was marked as “included” and estimated to cost between $400,000 and $600,000.
An option designated as “designed by Spectrum staff” was estimated to cost between $900,000 and $1.2 million. The total cost estimate for Spectrum, recorded on the January 2001 budget estimate: $600,000, thus changing the project definition to new “included” space.
Over the course of the 2001-2002 school year and into the beginning of 2003, a good portion of both the NKSD’s and the CFAC’s attention was absorbed into a rousing community debate over the site for Kingston High School.
When the new 800-student high school finally landed in its current location — right down the road from Spectrum — in 2003, the Spectrum Community started thinking about revamping and reorienting its entire campus.
Also at that time, NKSD director of Capital Programs Robin Shoemaker distributed a preliminary budget for the Spectrum multi-purpose room to the CFAC, and committee members began to feel the budget pinch.
“Many questions are open ended, such as future programming, type and location of facility,” Dec. 9, 2003 CFAC meeting minutes state. “$600,000 may not be adequate.”
Notes from a later CFAC meeting in March 2004 said of the project progress, “Difficult to determine where we are on a time line, because it depends on long-term plans for Spectrum, which are unclear.”
With logging set to begin at the KHS site at that time, Spectrum and the CFAC — to a lesser extent — pondered the possibility of changing the community school’s vehicular and pedestrian entrances while creating a landscape buffer. Those discussions then segued into a reorientation of the campus from west to east and a reconfiguration of the site’s overall master plan, protecting Spectrum’s seclusion. However, it also delayed work on the multi-purpose room as the overall master plan for the site had to be arranged first.
In May 2004, an ed spec committee of Spectrum and district officials and community members were tasked with determining Spectrum’s program direction and facility needs. Hopes were that group would complete the process and come back to the CFAC in the following October, allowing for construction to begin during the 2004-2005 school year. But the debate raged on with Spectrum supporters advocating for a stand alone building, while the district pondered the “included” option.
Saturday, the Herald will look into the process of compromise between the two, and where the project is now.
