SLSD: Listening, Learning, Acting
Throughout our town halls, surveys, and our recent building tours, we’ve gotten a lot of questions about our facilities. Specifically, some concern was raised that our newer buildings were built too small for the rapid pace of enrollment in our district.
Financing a construction project is complicated, and for better or worse, there are a lot of people outside our district that have a say in the final product. The State of Ohio plays a large role in both financing buildings and impacting what they look like. Prior to beginning a construction project, the State of Ohio employs Future Think (a third party consultant) to predict enrollment. It’s not unusual for the district to disagree with the analysis of the State and their consultants, but they hold the final decision making power. Then it’s left up to us to make it work in reality.
So, the bad news is we SLSD has a limited say in the size of any building we construct. The good news…the State of Ohio, in our most recent projects, paid 32 cents on the dollar toward completion. This means, that by partnering with them, local taxpayers were saved from funding an additional $32 million toward those projects.
SLSD is constantly working to make improvements and adjustments based on increasing enrollment - stay tuned in the next few weeks to learn about how!
