Worthington schools look ahead for more space

It's a sure thing that within two years, the Worthington, Ohio, Board of Education will ask voters for both an operating levy and a bond issue to begin to deal with cramped, aging buildings.

The timing and size of that request is still up in the air. If the board follows the recommendations of a community group, the eventual price tag could top $150 million, which doesn't include regular maintenance and technology upgrades.

Worthington High School

"What the board votes to put on the ballot as a bond issue will determine the scope of the project," said Worthington Superintendent Trent Bowers.

"As a public school district, we would like to do a lot of things, but we at Worthington will strive to be conservative," Bowers said.

At a mid-December school board meeting, Amy Lloyd and Nikki Hudson, co-chairwomen of a facilities task force, presented recommendations for how to address problems in all 19 buildings, broken into three phases.

Aging facilities, averaging about 50 years old district-wide, are a concern, they said, but the capacity problems are more urgent.

The Worthington district is among the top 10 fastest-growing school districts in Ohio. Enrollment has risen by 1,000 students in five years, and projections show that it will grow by another 800 to 1,000 students in the next five years. In 2026-27, Worthington will have an estimated 11,273 students, significantly above its 1998 enrollment of 10,600 students.

"Almost all of that is housing turnover," Bowers said, meaning younger families replacing older couples.

The task force recommends spending $46 million on the first phase. Construction would likely start immediately after a successful ballot issue.

That includes $20 million to demolish and rebuild part of Worthingway Middle School and another $20 million to reopen Perry Middle School (which currently only houses a magnet program), requiring a 50,000-square-foot addition. Kilbourne and McCord middle schools would be renovated at $2.5 million each. The rest would shore up Thomas Worthington High School.

The middle-school makeovers come first because they are needed to alleviate crowding. All Worthington sixth-graders would be moved to the middle schools, leaving the elementaries K-5. Because of the construction schedule, that wouldn't happen until 2021 at the earliest, Bowers said.

The task force also set out to rebalance enrollment in the two high schools. Worthington Kilbourne and Thomas Worthington high schools have about the same capacity, but Kilbourne stands at 1,250 students while Thomas Worthington is filling up, with 1,740 students. The group's recommendation is to shift one elementary school into the feeder pattern for Kilbourne.

The second phase, costing $82.5 million and beginning in five to six years at the earliest, would include rebuilding Thomas Worthington High School for $40 million, renovating Kilbourne High School for $5 million and rebuilding two undetermined elementary schools for $37.5 million.

Phase Three would be another rebuilt elementary school, for $22.5 million.

Board member Marc Schare, at his last regular meeting before leaving office, praised the hard work of the community group, even as he quibbled with details. "Ultimately ... all of you are going to be called upon to defend the plan in the court of public opinion because you're going to have to go out and convince people to spend a significant amount of money on it."

Schare said an easier, more cost-effective plan would be to build an elementary school in the northeast quadrant, where the most students are. However, one of the benefits of the task force's plan, he said, is that it creates middle schools with grades 6-8.

Right now, the district is using four modular classrooms at Colonial Hills Elementary and two at Worthington Hills Elementary. Evening Street Elementary School rents two classrooms from the neighboring McConnell Arts Center for kindergarten, and it sends its sixth-graders to Kilbourne Middle School.

This is quite a turnabout from 15 years ago, when enrollment was dropping precipitously and the Worthington board began discussing closing buildings.

"Everything went north of us to Delaware County," Bowers said. Enrollment fell to 9,200 students by 2010.

As a result, Sutter Park Elementary School was converted to an all-preschool building in 2005. In 2010, Perry Middle School closed as a full school and now houses only an alternative lottery program, Phoenix Middle School.

Now that there's renewed interest in moving back toward the urban core, Worthington is seeing most of its population boom in areas along High Street.

Education also has changed in those 20 years since the last boom, Bowers said. Back then, Worthington, and most other public districts, had no all-day kindergarten program. Now 60 percent of the district's kindergartners attend all day.

In 1998, there might've been two classes for autistic students, he said, which require much lower student-to-teacher ratios and more space. Now there are 12 classes.

Tribune Content Agency
School bonds Ohio
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