Dr. Steve Troyer answers the public’s questions about the Milford Elementary School project.

Text and Photos
By Marissa Sweatland
InkFreeNews

MILFORD — The Wawasee Community School Corporation held a community engagement session where the Milford community was able to voice public input for what they would like too see in the new Milford Elementary School. Multiple members of the project design team were in attendance, ready to hear suggestions and feedback from the public.

The meeting started with community engagement prompts. Emily Hower, of Elevatus Architecture and an architect on the project, displayed the prompt, “In one word, describe what you desire the new Milford Elementary School should be?” The most popular answers to this prompt were “inspirational,” “inviting,” “safe” and “educational pillar.” The second prompt read, “In a short phrase, what comes to mind when you think of the town Milford?” The most popular answers to this prompt were “friendly,” “family,” and “community.”

Once the prompts were answered and discussed, Hower pointed the public’s attention to the dot stickers on the table. Attendees were asked to place a sticker to vote on three design options for the new school. On board one, the public could vote on the design and style of the school’s exterior. On board two, the design and style of the school’s interior and on board three, community program spaces. Employees in the WCS corporation voted with a red sticker, families of Milford Elementary students voted with a green sticker and other community members voted with a yellow sticker.

Once attendees were back in their seats, Hower opened the floor up to discuss why they chose the options that they did. On board one, traditional style of school exteriors reigned in the most votes. While one style got no votes because the public agreed it was “too collegiate.” On board two, the votes were more spaced out than board one. The public were excited about the gym interiors, as they pulled in the most votes. On the third board, the playground and gym swept most of the votes. The baseball field also received a handful of votes.

The point of the voting was to allow the community to show the design team what they wanted the new school to be. The feedback will be used by the design team.

Once discussion of the boards wrapped up, Dr. Steve Troyer opened the floor for the public to ask questions about the project.

Q: Why did the corporation decide to build a new building as opposed to a significant renovation to the current building?

“Last spring, we went through a really large community engagement process in which we put together a committee of nearly 50 people to work through helping the board make decisions about what is important to the community. One of the things that came up in that conversation was that this particular facility needed some attention. On the surface, everything about this building looks nice. Partly because 5-6 years ago we gave the building a face lift with new paint, new carpet, new lockers and ceiling tile. That was done at the time really as a ‘we’re going to give Milford school one last face lift before we do something different.’ And that something different has come at this time. The systems and mechanical infrastructure in this building is quite old. A lot of the systems that are integral to the building were built in 1958 and maintaining them is becoming quite a challenge. This building is the oldest building in the district. There are some unique things about the design that make a renovation far more challenging than doing a rebuild. There is a lot of infrastructure stuff that does not support us continuing in this building. We did do a study with MKS, where we compared doing a significant renovation to the building versus building a new building and where they ended up coming at was it is going to cost as much or even more money to do a significant remodel to get this building up to where it needs to be in 2023,” Troyer explained.

MKS is the contractor on the project.

Q: What capacity is being planned for?

“The building currently is a two section building, which means we have two classes in each grade level. There are about 265 students. We have designed the floor plan to be three sections, so at each grade level there will be three classrooms and 2 pre-K classrooms. We have built in expandability, we could go to four sections if we needed to. We could add another eight classrooms to the building if we needed to. For reference, I think North Webster is four sections and Syracuse is five sections. So three sections would allow approximately 420 students in the building,” Troyer explained.

Q: What is the timeline of the project?

“We are in the design phase probably through next spring, early summer. Right now we’re getting close to blocking in a floor plan, but then they have to go in and design all the blueprints. Once they get that done, then there will be a bidding period and then hopefully we will be ready to start construction next summer at some point. Then we are probably looking at a 24-month build window. That will put us opening school the summer of 2026-27,” Troyer explained.

Q: Will the classrooms be about the same capacity as they currently are?

“Yes, I think we talked about a cap of 25 students in the early elementary grades and 30 students in the upper elementary. Right now, I do not think we have anything over that limit,” Troyer explained.

“25 is our cap right now in each class. Some grade levels have 18-19 or 17-18,” Michael Casey, principal of Milford Elementary, explained.

Q: What is the tax impact?

“Zero tax impact! We have come up on a window of period which schools get every so often and that is when we have existing debt that falls off. So that is a window of opportunity for us to invest in our facilities from a tax stand point. So that falls off and we backfill that with new projects and new work so we are able to keep the tax impact steady. We are a .5399 school tax rate for the last two years and that’s our projected tax rate for next school year. We are able to do this project completely without raising property taxes,” Troyer explained.

Q: What is the total cost of the project?

“This part of the project, we are looking at approximately $35 million,” Troyer answered.