Saturday, April 4, 2009

Where will Bosque Farms students go to school next year?

Melissa Hubbell News-Bulletin Staff Writer; mhubbell@news-bulletin.com

Bosque Farms Families of Bosque Farms Elementary School students filled the cafeteria Tuesday waiting for answers to where their children will attend classes while the school does a $13 million renovation.

"We're going to have something just as nice or nicer than any other school in the district," Principal, Ron Hendrix said. "It's going be a gem in this community,"

With the reconstructing of BFE comes the question of where students will be housed during the construction.

"The portable site next to Katherine Gallegos Elementary would be the easiest move," Hendrix said.

BFE is housed on 4.6 aces, which is small for an elementary school. Typically, an elementary schools will have anywhere from 10 to 15 acres. The district's new Sundance Elementary, for example, is housed on 14.7 acres.

The architect for the project needs roughly three acres to mobilize, which includes bringing trucks into the site, having room to store materials and building portable construction fences to block the construction off for safety. This would leave 1.6 acres available for students and staff.

Superintendent Walter Gibson and Hendrix have stated that this is a possibility but that it would leave students without a playground, and dust and noise levels would both be high and distracting to the classroom atmosphere. Access to the school by parents for pick up and drop off and parking would also be limited.

Architect Miriam Hicks said that keeping the children at BFE in portables would simply add aggravation to an already congested area.

"Do you want the inconvenience of relocating (to a different school) or of congestion?" Hicks asked.

Katherine Gallegos Elementary has both sufficient room for BFE students, 30 classroom portables and the experience necessary to make a school with 800-plus students flow in an organized manner. Last year, two schools were run on KG's grounds while Sundance Elementary was being built.

Relocating to Daniel Fernandez Elementary, which is located in closer proximity to Bosque Farms, was at one time an option, but one that Hendrix said is "probably not going to happen." Although DFE has sufficient room available, Gibson said that 12 to 15 portables would have to be moved onto the site. The cost of moving a portable from one site to another is about $20,000, totalling anywhere from $300,000 to $400,000.

If Bosque Farms Elementary did move to the Katherine Gallegos campus, Gibson said that it would be run the same way Sundance Elementary was when they shared a campus with KG. Both schools would be on the campus but run as two different schools with different lunch times, recesses and possibly even start and end times.

Many parents voiced concerns about moving to a different school for 18 months. Some worried about possible animosity between the children at the two schools, but Marez, vice president of the Los Lunas Board of Education, reassured the parents that wouldn't happen.

She repeated one of the district's mottos: "Two cats, one district." She referred to the Tigers of Los Lunas High School and the Jaguars of Valencia High.

Other parents said they believe the situation at Katherine Gallegos was good.

"You wouldn't have been able to tell that there were 800 kids at KG (last year)," Gibson said. "It was an amazingly well-run place."

"If they were my kids, I'd much rather have them away from the construction," Maria said, adding that learning and teaching is not dependent on a building, whether in a portable at BFE or KG.

"I think you underestimate our kids. They are very resilient. I think this will be a great adventure for them, and they'll learn far more on a new and different campus than one that's constantly in construction," said a BFE teacher.

The renovation will include improvements to the original building created in 1937 as well as a complete tear-down of the wing on the southeast corner of the school built in 1965. In its place, a new two-story classroom addition will be built, including an art room and music room. The renovation will also include getting the school up to its 500-student capacity.

Hendrix said that if everything goes as planned, construction will be ready to start as early as October. In that case, BFE students would start their year off at Katherine Gallegos to have as little disruption to the children's education as possible.

A presentation on the school's construction plans by Ron Hendrix and Miriam Hicks will be held at the next school board meeting at 6 p.m. Tuesday, April 14, at the central office boardroom. Gibson said that the decision of where BFE students will have school next year will be voted on by the board at its April 28 meeting.

Hendrix said any updates or news regarding the school's plans will be sent out through Teleparent and a note home.

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