Friday, October 2, 2020

FM #357 School Comm Facility Analysis Mtg - 9/30/20 (audio)

FM #357 = This is the Franklin Matters radio show, number 357 in the series.

This shares part of the Franklin, MA School Committee Facility Analysis SubCommittee meeting that was held on Wednesday, September 30, 2020. The meeting was conducted via conference bridge to adhere to the ‘social distancing’ requirements of this pandemic period.

A quick recap:
  • Where are we? Recall that there was a question asked if the Davis Thayer School could be closed to save money?
  • The Facility Analysis Subcommittee was formed and set up their 5 step process. They are still on step 1. A public information session was held in March (before the shutdown). Another public information session will be scheduled for November, TBD.
  • A demographic analysis was done and handed over to the architects for use in their facility assessment. Oh, the demographic analysis will be redone with the official Oct 1 numbers. It should be of interest for that analysis to see how well the forecast turned out. There would be an update sometime in the future to the Subcommittee (no timeline provided).
  • The work by the subcommittee stopped during the summer after the first preview of the facility report was presented June 11, 2020. Stopped due to the work required by the District to prepare the re-opening plan for all schools in September. Now that schools are back albeit remote and moving to hybrid, there is time for the committee to resume its work.
  •  So the architect report gets presented with the data gathered and analyzed. The five options for consideration were presented. Instead of closing one elementary school, the long term report recommendation is to close the three oldest elementary schools, keeping three elementary schools to feed to one central middle school (yes, closing two other middle schools) all feeding to the one high school.
  • How about that for generating some conversation?
The meeting runs just about 75 minutes, so let’s listen to the meeting of Sep 30, 2020

Audio file =  https://franklin-ma-matters.captivate.fm/episode/fm-357-school-comm-facility-analysis-mtg-9-30-20

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The agenda doc, including connection info

https://www.franklinmatters.org/2020/09/facilities-analysis-sub-committee.html

 

My notes taken via Twitter during the meeting are summarized here

https://www.franklinmatters.org/2020/10/facility-analysis-subcommittee-long.html 

 

Photos used in the Twitter thread can be found in the Google photo album

https://photos.app.goo.gl/RB1AXrc4abYTPEm56


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The music for the intro and exit was provided by Michael Clark and the group "East of Shirley". The piece is titled "Ernesto, manana"  c. Michael Clark & Tintype Tunes, 2008 and used with their permission.

I hope you enjoy!

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FM #357 School Comm Facility Analysis Mtg - 9/30/20 (audio)
FM #357 School Comm Facility Analysis Mtg - 9/30/20 (audio)


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