Playground, parking changes mulled at MEMS

Andrew McKeever

GNAT-TV News Project

MANCHESTER — A large crowd of more than 60 residents filled the Jackie Parks Room at the Manchester Elementary Middle School Tuesday, Nov. 29, to hear the most recent proposal to reconfigure school playground and parking areas.

The primary objective behind the overhaul was the safety of schoolchildren being dropped off by parents. Other pedestrians and motorists would also benefit from improved sidewalks and lighting, in addition to the expanded parking facilities, both Town Manager John O’Keefe and MEMS co-Principal Martin Nadler told the audience during an overview of the project, which is estimated to cost in the vicinity of $1.5 million.

The current situation was “an accident waiting to happen,” Nadler said near the start of what turned into a 2 hour-long joint meeting between the town’s select and school boards.

Under the proposal, Memorial Avenue would be closed off near the main entrance to MEMS and a cul-de-sac created for vehicles to drop off kids and then turn around to leave the area. School Street, which currently meets Memorial Avenue at the corner formed by a playing field, would also be converted into a roadway for school buses, which would drop off students at the western side of MEMS. However the two streets would be linked by the creation a new roadway. It would run along the back side of the current playing field and connect with Memorial Avenue in front of a new public parking lot containing 73 parking spaces which would be carved out of part of the existing playing field. However, enough green space would remain to create a 50 yard-by-30 yard recreation area for students, along with a playground area. The basketball court, currently on the other side of School Street/Memorial Avenue, would be moved across the street next to the new playground.

Another parking area, primarily for school personnel and visitors, and containing 69 spaces, would be built on a part of the field west of the school, known as Bowen Field, to replace currently dilapidated parking areas. Two new playing fields would be constructed behind the school, each one large enough to host official school league games or another tournament matches.

The total cost put it into the range of some of the bigger and more significant infrastructure projects the town has seen in recent years, O’Keefe said. Funding from it could come from several sources: state grants; a mitigation agreement with the developers of a nearby bank project; revenue from the sale of the current town-owned parking area behind the Rite Aid building, widely considered to be in poor shape at present; issuing a municipal bond; the town’s existing CIRC fund, which is used for infrastructure projects like this; and funding through the town and school budgets and raising tax revenue accordingly.

The proposed playground would not be included in the $1.5 million figure. Estimated to cost about $250,000, the hope is that this sum could be raised by private donations through the Friends of MEMS, a group organized more than 10 years ago to fundraise for programs and projects that were desirable but outside the scope of the school district’s budget, said Bill Drunsic, a member of the group.

The advantage to private fundraising, as opposed to funding it with school district tax money, is that every dollar raised privately would go to the playground. If raised through the budget, the tax revenue would become part of the state educational tax formula developed under Act 68, and to put together the $250,000 sum would require raising more than that through taxes. That money is sent to Montpelier and redistributed through the educational spending formula, but not all of it returns to the localities where they are raised, in the case of towns like Manchester where the grand list indicates an above average level of affluence.

“We think we’d get a lot more bang for the buck and things would happen quicker and easier to tap the generosity  the community has shown over the years,” Drunsic told the audience.

Several questions were lobbed at town officials about various aspects of the plan. Most of the questions were supportive and the large contingent of parents in the audience stressed the safety factor and the need to do something to improve the traffic flow and drop-off and pick up situation.

Erica Lawrence-Dearstyne, the president of the MEMS Parents Teachers Organization, said that cars often sped through the School Street /Memorial Avenue roadway at speeds approaching or exceeding 40 mph, and that the parking lot behind the Rite Aid store where many parents parked to drop off their kids was “a disaster,” especially during the winter months.

“There is no perfect plan for everybody in town … the plan needs to be cohesive and proactive before something bad happens,” she said. “It will make this end of town easier. There’s no perfect scheme but this seems like the most logical I’ve seen so far.”

Later in the meeting, Nadler noted that one of the factors that made the drop-off and pick-up situation different from an earlier era — such as when MEMS was originally built about 70 years ago — was that many more parents today drive their kids to school instead of having them transported on a school bus. Nowadays, the school buses are only used by approximately 25 percent of the eligible students. The reason is that for many families, where both parents are working, it’s vastly more convenient for them to drop off their kids on their way to work, rather than have the morning influenced by when the school bus passed by their homes or nearest bus stop, he said.

Others in the audience zeroed in on certain aspects of the parking and roadway layout, such as resident Brad Khristiansen, who wondered if the proposed layout would create a backup of cars waiting to unload or pick up children that would spill back towards Main Street, creating congestion.

Jen Moore, a MEMS parent, raised a concern about whether it would be better to locate the playground behind the school building, rather than out in front in the green space area that would be preserved from the existing athletic field. Having the playground out in front, even with school supervision, might not offer the same level of protection, she said.

Nadler responded by saying the school had never had a problem that he knew of with non-school associated people entering the school’s property during the daytime hours when school was in session. At present, the path alongside Bowen Field was the point of greatest concern, where a path led to the town’s Rec Park. Under the new plan, one of the two fields under consideration would be further removed from that pathway. But the area in front of the school, especially when there would be teachers or other school personnel present, should be a manageable situation, he said.

Amelia Sherwood, a MEMS student, read an essay to the audience she had written about the playground, which highlighted its importance and the need for safe playground equipment, adding that some of the current facilities on the playground weren’t in top-flight shape.

“A playground is where a child learns … how to socialize and practice athleticism and push ourselves to do better,” she said. “It’s where we can block out the world and do whatever motivates us.”

Brian Vogel, a former Manchester School District Board chairman and board member, asked what the anticipated time frame was for completing the project once it got started, if it’s eventually approved. The project should be done in about a year once construction began, said Christina Haskins, an engineer with the Dufresne Group, a firm that has been working with the town and the school district on the project.

Vogel also asked how much of the projected $1.5 million price tag would be paid for through town money or school district money. That followed an earlier question posed by resident Victoria Silsby about an Act 46 dimension,  and led to an exchange with Jon Wilson, the chairman of the Act 46 merger study committee which recently submitted a proposal for a consolidated school district that would include Manchester, Dorset, Danby, Mt. Tabor, Sunderland and the four towns of the Mountain Towns RED. If such a merged district is eventually approved — and that will depend first on obtaining approval from the State Board of Education and then from voters, presumably during March Town Meetings, all the assets and liabilities of the new merged district, which would come into full effect by July 1, 2018, would be shared between all the districts. There will be one budget and eventually one tax rate, he said. But that could mean that residents of other communities in the new merged district would eventually be helping pay for the new parking lot/playground overhaul, should a bond financed through the Manchester School district, be selected as one of the financing options.

“This is an important consideration for everyone here,” Wilson said.

Ordinarily, it’s cheaper for a municipality to borrow money than it would be for a school district, because the tax revenue that would go to pay off the bond doesn’t have to go through a complex funding formula in which the state retains a share of the local money, O’Keefe said.

But the prospect of a merged district scenario “throws an interesting strategy into the equation,” said Select Board chairman Ivan Beattie.

“Under the new structure, if it happens, it becomes a whole different animal, because now everybody in the district would be contributing to the bond,” he said. “Those are the kinds of things we have to look at, and suddenly it may make more sense for the school to bond.”

However, those were questions without hard answers yet, since the amount of money that might be available from state grant sources for the parking and sidewalk improvements wasn’t known at this point.

Another public meeting may be held to refine the plan further and then a decision will have to be made on whether to include the proposal as an article on the Town Warning for next March’s Town Meeting, officials said towards the end of the meeting.

“There may still be a little tweaking to do here before going public with a design, but I learned a long time ago that voters make great decisions …. The wheels of government work slowly for a really good reason,” Beattie said. “Hopefully we get a really good project when it’s all done.”

And one of the options that remained on the table was to do nothing, he added.

An overview of the presentation is available on the town’s website or can be viewed by clicking on this link: http://manchester-vt.gov/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/MEMS-Greenspace-Memorial-Avenue-Presentation-dated-November-29-2016.pdf

GNAT is also preparing a video segment of the meeting.