January 8, 1998 -- As the New Year began, the most active town committee had to be the newly-formed School Site Selection Committee. Under the friendly but determined leadership of former Selectman Steve Zemo, the committee of 13 volunteers has become a well-organized team, leaving no stone unturned in their search for the best spot for the new Lower Middle School.
This week the Committee examined the suitability of publicly-owned land as a site for that school. They met three times: twice in sessions at the Town Hall, and on Saturday in the field, hiking hill and dale, inspecting town-owned properties. Story, photos here. Thursday's meeting was the first analytical meeting of the Committee. In this session, Linda Bunyon from the Board of Education offered some insight as to the size of the building that would probably be required.
Over the past ten years, middle schools in the State of Connecticut have averaged 164 square feet per student. Elementary schools have averaged 141 square feet. Since the proposed lower-middle school would be a hybrid of those two requirements, the Committee concluded an average of about 150 square feet per student would be a good working average.
Mrs. Bunyon also confirmed that the school is expected to house about 1,000 students. This means the school will need about 150,000 square feet of floor space on one floor, including hallways, gyms, cafeteria, library and special use rooms. Mike Violante added a special insight at this point. A two story school is highly practical, but one cannot assume a two story school simply cuts in half the required floor space. Many parts of the school, such as gyms, cafeteria, library and special use rooms, require extra height and are in effect two-story structures. Classrooms cannot be built on top of a gym, for example; that would make those classrooms three stories high. A good rule of thumb, he reported, was to assume that switching from a one-story design to a two-story design would reduce the required footprint on the ground by only 33%. Therefore, the Commitee should look for land with roughly 90,000-120,000 square feet of footprint (or roughly 3 acres under one roof).
Di Masters, Joseph Heyman and others then explained the effect of zoning regulations on the footprint issue. In an area zoned RA, a building can cover 10% of the lot. A 100,000 sq. ft. school thereby needs 23 acres of land. In RAA zones, coverage cannot exceed 7%, so the same school requires 33 acres, and a RAAA zone limits development to 5% so the same school would need 46 acres.
In short, based upon all the data collected by the Committee so far, the new school will need at least 3 acres under one roof, at least 5-10 additional acres for septic, parking and fields, situated on between 23 to 50 acres to meet all of the various operational, engineering, and zoning requirements.
Starting from a list of about 120 largest parcels in town provided by the Tax Assessor's office, the Committee then got down to the work of pruning the list of potential sites: Di Masters reviewed all of the lands owned by the Land Conservancy in Ridgefield, which includes some of the biggest parcels. Not one met the criteria. Gary Smith reviewed all of the State-owned land in town. Most of it is wetlands (the Great Swamp), reserved for Route 7 expansion, or located in narrow strips along Route 7. All of these were found inappropriate. Paul Jaehnig then reviewed the 33 largest pieces of land owned by the Town. Some were obviously excluded, like the Town golf course. Others were compared to the wetland maps and the zoning maps and found unbuildable. Pine Mountain, the biggest piece of land in town, was judged too far from the center of town and too vertical. Two parks, Richardson Park across the street from the High School, and the McManus wildlife refuge on Osceola, were surprise findings and may be excellent locations, while the Prospect Ridge ball fields are large enough for a 113,000 sq. ft. footprint if the deed restrictions can be managed.
Joseph Heyman reviewed all of the current schools in town, including Notre Dame and the Old High School. Of these, the High School has available land, Notre Dame fits (barely) and the Scotland School/Barlow Mountain campus has potential. The Old High School definitely does not fit.
Late in the evening it was agreed that there were five town-owned sites which deserved consideration. These are:
The Committee walked these sites on Saturday morning (photos here) and will meet on Monday at 7:30 pm to review their findings, and begin its review of properties not owned by the town.
The Site Selection Committee meetings are very important to the future of the town, but unlike most town meetings these are very lively and very interesting. They are far and away the best show in town. The public is welcome and is encouraged to attend.
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