Submitted to the Ann Arbor News for "Other Voices" on 24 May 2000. Joseph L. Gelinas. The Ann Arbor public school district is seeing growth in its student population, especially at the high schools. Current projections show the population peaking a few years out and then dropping some, but to a level still higher than what we have today. We don't know what will happen after that: will the high school population continue to decline? Will other school-age populations begin to grow? I'm not convinced that growth is going to be eternal, so I am also thinking about what to do with a new building ten to twenty years out. Any new school building should be designed from the ground up to be flexible: reconfiguring the building for a different grade configuration should be cheap and easy. That is the only way a building can be foreseen to continue to meet our school district's needs throughout its lifetime. To that end, here is a proposal: Build a five-spoked building: four spokes designed to house independent schools of four hundred to six hundred students, a fifth spoke containing shared athletic facilities, auditoriums, shops and such, and a central hub containing the media center, some administrative offices, and some other common spaces (a cafeteria, for example). The independent wings should probably have some administrative space, and *maybe* a theater/auditorium sized for its population. We can work out the details later. For now, each wing would be used as a separate 9-12 high school; I think students should be able to expect to stay in a single place for their high-school career (*unless* they decide to move, for their own reasons). Should the high school population drop as much as it might, one of the wings could be changed from a high school to a middle or elementary school, as needed. (The second half of my fifth grade was spent in a wing of the high school in Oscoda; I don't remember any problems.) Offering all of the grades in a single wing, rather than devoting each wing to a single grade, should both improve student 'connectedness' and maximise flexibility for future needs. Grouping the schools together would allow them to pool resources for low-demand classes, like some foreign languages and AP courses, or large-audience classes, like orchestra or band. (Of course, they could also decide to run small bands and choirs of their own.) In conjunction with this new building, we could divide Pioneer and Huron into independent schools of a size similar to that suggested for the new complex. Of course, converting Pioneer and Huron into independent schools will only succeed if the students, faculty and staff of those schools want the independent schools. We will have to make sure that everyone agrees that indepedent but cooperating schools is appropriate. The drawings of other schools displayed at the various school board meetings show that we could probably fit an independent school of four to five hundred students on each floor of both Pioneer and Huron. It may be that a different division of the available space would make more sense, but again, we can work out the details. The key is to make the borders obvious without building walls. And as with the (proposed) new complex, should the population distribution change, the independent areas could be redirected to meet the arising need. We also have to face the problem of staffing. We have been cutting teachers (*after* cutting administration as much as seemed possible) to stay within our operating budget. Those cuts, and those limits, are an important part of the overcrowding problem. Building a new building is not going to make the staffing any better, as the administration has been saying for the past several years. David Flowers repeatedly said, "We can't afford to operate a new high school." The recent action to increase teaching staff will require more teaching space. A new building will help to provide that space. At least we won't need to add many, if any, administrators: Pioneer currently has five vice-principals plus Bob Galardi; Huron has four plus Arthur Williams. That's eleven people, or roughly one administrator for every five hundred students. Four schools in the new complex and three each in Pioneer and Huron would have ten slots for an administrator, each with a number of students similar to what they have right now. We will need some additional counselors, but we need them anyway. If we assign them to smaller schools, they should be able to do a better job, so we *may* not need as many. Note that I am not suggesting any changes to Project Education, Roberto Clemente or Community; right now, we need the high school spaces they offer. Also note that this suggestion does not address the teaching programs within the suggested new schools. These details can be worked out later, while the building is being built, as the population to be housed in it is identified. As we all know, people are still moving to Ann Arbor. Further, the Ann Arbor Public Schools don't have all of the students yet: some attend private schools and others attend charter schools. (And then there is the open-border legislation that would let us accept students from neighboring school districts.) So maybe we will need all the space we can build, and even more. But this seems to me a place to start.