“And in order to create the conditions that we want to have in Lakeville area schools, we have to have the best learning environments that we can afford to get.”

Explaining the need for improved learning environments.

“One of the most important things and for some of you that are in the room here that are volunteers or uh get involved in our community, thank you for doing that.”

Acknowledging community volunteers.

“We do survey our community when we talk about levies or bonds of any kind. Um we do that using Morris Leatherman which is a uh uh polling firm that does scientific surveys and uh want to share some of those results uh from this most recent survey.”

Discussing community feedback mechanisms.

“The one thing that I feel strongly tells our story in Lakeville uh in in our school system is the growth that we're having not just in Lakeville, but Elco New Market and in Credit River.”

Highlighting district growth.

“We are going to grow and continue to grow as a community and uh as the city lays out their plans and hands out permits or authorizes permits um that implied re situation is that we're going to have more kids in our system and uh that doesn't get talked a lot about when these permitting decisions are being made.”

Addressing the challenge of projected student growth.

“85% is what we use as the marker because uh the other balance of that to the 100% is we have to fit in special ed and uh any other um space requirements to fit our students and staff in a building.”

Explaining the 85% building capacity metric.

“So uh, if you're Elco New Market City Council or Credit River or Lakeville City Council, these are things that are should be front and center as you're talking about it, but always implied is that we're going to have to grow. And growth means you have to have space for those those students to uh to come into the system.”

Urging city councils to consider school growth.

“So, uh, I just want to make sure that everybody understands that we're trying to create that space with additions to get us to the, uh, able to deal with that variation that we may have to deal with coming in the next few years.”

Reiterating the purpose of facility additions.

“For the last decade, uh, Lakeville Schools has received guidance, uh, from a facilities advisory group. Uh, there is support for our decision- making that we're trying to be more robust with as we move forward here.”

Mentioning the role of a facilities advisory group.

“I want to predicate our planning designing with regard to facilities on a teaching and learning strategy that's more long-term and uh build off of that.”

Emphasizing long-term strategic planning for facilities.

“Um, and we want to make sure that we can handle more kids and do that in a more streamlined manner.”

Addressing cafeteria capacity issues.

“So, uh, some of the schools like I don't know if you've been around Meguire or JFK and pick up and drop off, it's kind of challenging back there. Uh, so we want to see if we can do some uh improvement to that situation.”

Discussing pick-up/drop-off challenges.

“If it fails, uh, our biggest challenge is going to be uh increased class sizes and some challenging u overcrowding is about the only word I can articulate for it.”

Consequences if the bond fails.

“The ballot question asked for 139,600,000 to do the improvements and the uh uh additions on these schools.”

Stating the bond referendum amount.

“The cost of that my estimate would be if the the way you would build another middle school is and be as responsible as you can be with that is you would take one offline, maybe build a new middle school bigger, but you have to do land acquisition for that. You have to obviously in a contemporary environment build a new school that takes 36 months minimum. And then you would have to be repurposing a middle school to maybe take some of the lease space that you have in the district offline or put some other things into that building and that would require a tenant improvement or a major renovation to fit something else in. in that condition, I could see you doing it. That my estimate on that is between 230 to $250 million. I don't think the numbers support that.”

Estimating the cost of building a new middle school.

“Yes. Couple years from now uh that that's probably going to be a need for us. But I think we have to do that in a bigger picture environment and not necessarily uh look at it as just what are we going to do with our high schools.”

Forecasting future high school needs.