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The Creston Community School Board Monday approved new, enhanced buses and listened to an update from the facilities committee about strengths, weaknesses and possible improvements.
Buses
The board purchased two buses from Hogland bus for $202,500. This was the lowest bid and will be paid for by PPEL/SAVE funds and ESSER III funds.
Superintendent Deron Stender said the buses comply with new safety regulations.
“The new buses, they’re required to have seatbelts and they all have the restraints on them, they have the camera systems for stoparms, so it’s got all the safety machanisms in place.”
Facilities
Eric Beron, of DLR group presented results from facilities committee workshops to the school board.
“We’re working through four dedicated workshops supplemented by some staff and student forums ultimately probably a community forum to just kind of test the waters with what needs to happen, what is wanted by the community to move Creston forward,” Beron said.
Workshop #1 in July had between 15 — 18 anonymous participants who gave suggestions to facilities based on strengths, weaknesses and capacity. Participants broke down the quality of facilities in each building. The elementary and middle school, the newest building, received the most favorable response, Beron said.
“There seem to be more site issues than building issues at this campus,” he said.
The Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) analysis broke down facilities items into those four categories. Beron said balanced responses transpired from this analysis.
“You can see there’s an even breakdown for all of those categories, which is always positive,” he said.
Some suggested improvements included parking improvements and performing arts renovations at the high school, drop-off site and FEMA gym improvements at the Elementary and Middle School and selling the existing Early Childhood Center building.
Workshop #2 completed on Aug. 11 took the suggestions and brought them before anonymous participants to confidentially investigate the reasons behind the suggested improvements. In September, the third workshop will investigate the costs of improvement.
“In workshop three we’ll come back and start to tackle how those look from a cost standpoint and a logistics standpoints,” Beron said.
The fourth and final workshop will present the fully developed plan with a bond referendum beginning development sometime in January. Beron suggested a community straw poll as an exercise he has seen accurately speculate the outcome of a bond referendum.
“In one of your neighboring communities, the list was $20 million, and the district had the wherewithal to go there, they had the resources to do that, but what they did was go with a $13 million plan and reserve some of that capacity for a future project down the road and had the committee made the consensus to say, ‘You know what? We should go all-in and go for the 20,’ by the straw poll, it would have failed,” he said.
In other Creston School Board news...
• CCSD has 32 new hires including a new special education director, Mollie Frazier
• The elementary school hired a K — 5 STEM and science program with a weekly science class and a monthly STEM class to meet standards to be implemented in 2022. The elementary school also introduced its learning above and beyond program which will include a monthly yoga class and a writer’s workshop for grades two through five.