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During its July meeting, the Caroline County Board of Education were presented with preliminary location studies for the new north Caroline County middle school. After hearing the presentations and brief discussions, The BOE did not make a decision on the site, and Board President Michele Wayman said the BOE will “study [the information presented by the project team] and bring questions” at their next meeting in August.
Site options for the new middle school building include property behind the Caroline County Sheriff’s Office on Double Hills Road or behind North Caroline High School in Ridgely. Several meetings with stakeholders, two community listening sessions, and almost a year of preliminary planning informed the information presented on the two building sites.
CCPS Director of Operations, Bill Mengel presented the annual Educational Facilities Master Plan report. The report noted that all CCPS facilities will continue as they are currently for five years, accounting for the new middle school build with room for flexibility in the timeline of the project.
Mengel provided Maryland Department of Planning data on population fluctuations in Caroline County, which show that Caroline’s growth has been slow in recent years and is projected to further slow. Projections are that the total number of students attending the new middle school will be at 945 by 2034, which means the planned building could hit its program capacity within 10 years if the population model trends are correct.
Regardless of the site where the school is built, the design of the building will be the same. David Lever and Debbie Szyfer presented to the BOE in the Educational Specifications study, which is a list of design considerations, architectural needs, and other details related to the “recipe” for the new school building.
The middle school building will need to meet state capacity requirements “gross area allowance” of 25:1 student-to-teacher ratio. Currently, Lockerman’s student-to-teacher ratio is lower at 17:1, and the differential between current ratio and state requirements may be questioned by state funders. Maryland may be wary of funding a school that has more square footage than it deems necessary. Lever ensured the BOE that CCPS and Maryland will have a conversation about funding, but “when they (the state) fund and how much they fund are based on factors out of our control,” Lever said.
In all, the anticipated budget for the project from start to finish - from construction materials to furniture - is $103,820,000, with $80,096,000 anticipated in state funding and $23,794,000 local share. There are items that are not eligible for state funding and will be entirely up to the local share to fund. Lever said that includes, “any square footage which is built beyond what the state considers as its gross area allowance.”
TCA Architects’ Robyn Toth and Civil Engineer Kevin Sheeron presented on each site in tandem to lay out the pros and cons of both.
The proposal plan for the North Caroline site places the new middle school almost directly behind the Caroline Career and Technology Center, with space in between to share an expanded version of the existing parking lot. Important aspects of this site plan are that the existing solar array and the barn and fenced pasture can remain intact, but the existing NCHS soccer fields will need to be rebuilt after geothermal wells are installed, and the existing NCHS softball and baseball fields will need to be relocated and reconstructed with a new parking area to support them. The total of this option for the new middle school is estimated at $85,264,000.
BOE member Mark Jones expressed concern with the placement of the existing solar panels in the center of the campus and possibly creating barriers to present and future workability. “This is going to affect people who haven’t even been born yet,” Jones said, “so I just want to make sure we do it right.” Toth explained that the purpose of the proposed site plans was to show that all the necessary elements in the Educational Specifications could fit on the property, and that specific maneuvering and designing of the space would be done at a later time.
The Double Hills Road option is estimated to have a slightly higher price tag of $85,747,000, due in part to the anticipated need for a new sewer pump station to support the school. The Feasibility Study noted that the Double Hills Road site is a “blank slate,” however, the team learned of the county developing a connector road that runs through the full 76-acre parcel behind the Sheriff’s Office during the Feasibility Study process. Shearon said the road has already been put out for bid, so the project team had to work with less acreage than originally thought and were more restricted in their use of the land.
In the end, the Feasibility Study found the NCHS site to be the better fit than Double Hills, due to challenges at Double Hills such as lacking existing infrastructure for water, sewer, and other utilities, a longer travel distance for students in the far North end of the county, the existence of wetlands and stream buffers on the land, and excess traffic nearby – specifically during beach-traffic season. According to a survey conducted by the project team, 60.6% of community members favor the NCHS site.
At the June 24 Caroline County Commissioners meeting, the Commissioners discussed the future location of the Northern Caroline County middle school. In their discussion, the Commissioners stated a preference for the NCHS site over the Double Hills Road site before having been presented with information from the various project studies. Superintendent Dr. Derek Simmons said he has been in contact with two of the Commissioners since that meeting, and President Wayman accepted BOE member Chrissy Bartz’s recommendation to set up a meeting with the Commissioners to further discuss the findings of the studies and strengthen cooperation on the development of the new middle school campus.
“This is probably the most important decision this Board is going to have to make,” Simmons said, as the Board agreed that much time and consideration have already gone into the project, for which they expressed their gratitude to all involved. It will continue to be, as Dr. Simmons says, “a marathon, not a sprint.”
