Reply to APS: Elementary Walk Zone surveys out

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The thing about those old school sites, is that a lot of them were tiny tiny schools, with significantly larger class sizes and less administration.  Look, for example, at the Lee Community Center.  That used to be a school.  From looking at the building, I'm guessing it had 7 classrooms of kids- one at each grade (6th grade was elementary.)  There were no special education coordinators, speech pathologists, school psychologists, etc.  I don't know what there were for specials either.
So while I think some of the community centers could be turned back into schools I don't think it is as easy as saying, just kick out the seniors and reclaim them as schools.  [/quote]

Well, they could definitely make them choice schools, and many of those lots would not be much smaller than the Wilson site, which at one point was planned for a 1300 student middle school.

Alternatively, making existing elementary schools multi level, but maintaining the large green space would not be terrible; not great, and there is no money for it anyway.[/quote]

There's a limit on their ability to make elementary schools multi-level for safety reasons. Virginia provides that all pre-k, kindergarten, first grade and self-contained SpEd classes are supposed to be on an exit floor for fire safety reasons; these classrooms also have larger minimum square footage requirements and must have bathrooms and coat closets in the rooms, so they take up a lot more space than other classrooms. On a flat parcel, by the time you place those on the first floor along with things like the cafeteria, gym, etc., you're typically going to end up with a larger enough footprint that you can fit the rest of the classes on only one additional level (or with a footprint that can be expanded to fit it all on two floors for less money than it would take to add a third floor).

If you have a parcel with a sharper grade so you can get two levels with direct exits (i.e., a "main" level, and then a level that's below grade on one side but walk-out on the other), I believe you could theoretically do a smaller footprint by spreading those classrooms between the two floors and then go up another couple of levels, but then you run into fire code issues that drive up construction costs significantly (e.g., must use specialty fire-resistant building materials for schools more than two stories; stairwells need special fire-resistant enclosures if they connect more than two floors).[/quote]

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