Facilities Planning Committee Holds First Meeting
There were plenty of opinions shared during the first meeting of the Huntington School District’s Long Range Facilities Planning Committee, which met in Cafeteria A at Huntington High School. The session was attended by more than three-dozen voting and non-voting committee members and about 25 other community residents.
“I thought it was a good meeting,” Superintendent John J. Finello said. “There was a great deal of information presented and some interesting ideas were raised. It’s a good group of people who are all committed to making this the best district it can be.”
The committee is charged with analyzing the district’s long term elementary level facilities needs and possible solutions to a current or future space crunch, “including discussions of availability, functionality and [the] costs of various building options.” The committee will consider existing, previously owned and potentially new school buildings, along with additions and alterations.
Mr. Finello kicked off Tuesday night’s meeting by discussing the current status of the district’s facilities and providing a short history of how individual buildings were used and the different grade level configurations that have been employed through the years.
Roger Smith, a principal in the architectural and engineering firm of Burton Behrendt Smith, is the committee’s facilitator. He distributed a 52-page packet of maps, charts and tables providing information about the district’s eight school buildings as well as the former Robert K. Toaz Junior High School located at 300 Nassau Road.
District officials have discussed a possible reacquisition of the Toaz site, which was used by Touro Law School for more than two decades and is currently owned by the Good News Church. Mr. Smith has previously stated that reacquiring Toaz would be much less expensive on a per square foot basis than building new space.
Mr. Smith explained how each of the district’s buildings is currently used and what their respective 2010/11 enrollment is projected to be as well as each building’s capacity based upon Huntington School Board class size guidelines and New York State Education Department regulations.
Individual committee members discussed everything from shuttering Jack Abrams School and building a large addition onto Woodhull School to constructing an entirely new building, and plenty of other possibilities.
Mr. Smith counseled that taking Jack Abrams School out of the mix would be costly to the tune of perhaps $20 million or more in order to make-up for the lost classroom space in one or more other locations.
Over the next few weeks, Mr. Smith said his team of architects will develop cost estimates for the various scenarios discussed at the meeting and share them at the committee’s next session scheduled for Tuesday, July 13 from 7-9 p.m. in Cafeteria A at Huntington High School. (There are three other committee meetings set for July 27, August 10 and August 24.)
Minutes of the committee’s meetings and documents presented to its members will be posted on the Huntington School District’s website at www.hufsd.edu as they become available.
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