Space Crunch Only Part of Problem

“You are presently in spaces that aren’t classrooms and that are not regulated as classrooms. The place looks pretty crowded,” the Springs School’s architect, Roger Smith of BBS Architects in Patchogue, told a newly formed facilities committee at its first meeting last week.

Committee members who are teachers or aides at the school, including Colleen McGowan, an art teacher, agreed.

“Not only are there teachers who are teaching out of closets right now, but there are teachers who are teaching off a cart going from room to room, which is very limiting,” Ms. McGowan said. She also pointed out there may be safety issues, for example in the gym, where as many as 98 kids — the entire sixth-grade class — take physical education at the same time.

The 13-member committee officially got to work on May 27 with a discussion of the aging building that is filled to capacity with students.

Mr. Smith said he ultimately envisions proposing a bond referendum that would fund an addition to the school. However, he said, the final recommendation would depend on what other ideas the facilities committee is able to develop.

In that process, though, the committee will likely bump up against the realities of the community, including a taxpayer base that already pays one of the highest tax rates on the South Fork and a student population that’s booming right now but which is expected to level off several years down the line. According to the May 11 enrollment report by Eric Casale, the school principal, Springs has 745 students, but a projection prepared by the Board of Cooperative Educational Services during the 2013-14 school year says enrollment in Springs is expected to drop to about 620 by 2023.

However, in Mr. Smith’s opinion, “there is nothing left for us to cut up” in the school to create more classroom space.

Mr. Smith also brought up a list of other fixes that he said need to be done to simply maintain the current building. That list totals just over $3 million worth of projects, including replacing the flat roof, estimated at $513,600; replacing the floors, estimated at $183,600; upgrading a mechanical fresh air system, estimated at $380,000; installing new electrical wiring and breakers, estimated at $200,000, and more.

Pamela Bicket, a committee member who does not have children in the school, questioned why the district waited so long to publicly discuss those needs.

“It seems like there has been a lag here, both in terms of accommodating students and accommodating the plant,” she said.

Mr. Smith came to the meeting with two new concepts for additions to the school. Both included new classrooms and support spaces because, in his opinion, the school is four to six classrooms short of what is actually needed. One of the new drawings included a new gym to be designated as the middle school gym.

“We were trying to think out how do I get the smallest thing that solves the most problems? If it’s the smallest one, it’s the least expensive,” said Mr. Smith, whose contract with Springs was not available by press time.

That’s when committee members began to chime in with ideas. Consolidation with other districts was mentioned, but is unlikely. One committee member suggested a consolidated middle school just for Springs, Montauk, and Amagansett, and another suggested developing an agreement with the Amagansett School to send some students there, where there may be more readily available space. Another suggestion was to begin sending middle school students directly to East Hampton, effectively shrinking the number of grades offered at Springs, but that would increase the operating budget significantly due to tuition costs.

Another committee member suggested moving the administrative offices to a portable building on school grounds, the school’s basement, or an office space elsewhere in town. However, Mr. Smith said, “the toughest thing to sell” is office space for the administration. “It is easier to sell classrooms,” he said.

Yet another suggestion was to see if the town of East Hampton would be willing to build a gym on town land, since it built a town facility on land belonging to the school district. That facility, the Springs Youth Association building, houses two of the district’s first-grade classes. The Springs Youth Association is currently defunct. A new gym on nearby town land could potentially negate the need to build a middle school gym on the actual campus.

More portable classrooms, Mr. Smith said, wind up costing only 15 to 20 percent less than permanent ones, and could take up to 18 months to put in place.

When the failed capital improvement referendum came up during the meeting, Jeff Miller, a member of the school board, said the board could have done a better job communicating with the public. The plan involved spending all or most of the district’s $2 million capital reserve fund on a parking lot, which would have been built on top of an existing baseball field, as well as widening Ed Hults Lane, reconfiguring the drop-off/pickup loop, and more. About 56 percent of the voters said no to the project.

“I actually feel that we kind of failed, as a board, to convey to the public everything that was going into the project,” Mr. Miller said. “There were too many people who didn’t understand how many facets there were to this work that was proposed. . . . Then there was information out there, in my opinion, that was completely false and that sunk our ship. But if we had done a better job in the first place, and informed the taxpayers as to exactly what was going on in the project, I think it would have gone right through. It’s something that has to be done.”