Results from Second Thoughtexchange Now Available
8/16/2018
Dear Kings Community,
We hope you enjoyed your summer! We are happy to have our students and staff back for this new school year. We are excited to welcome 300 new students to our District this school year! We are definitely growing! We have seen an increase in enrollment by 500 students in the last 3 years. In fact, those numbers are higher than the moderate projections that we received from Decision Insite.
Projections show that the District will see more growth over the next five years so, as you know, we have been going through a process called Thoughtexchange to get your feedback and thoughts about the future of Kings Schools.
In the Spring, we asked you to give us your feedback on our second Thoughtexchange process. In that exchange, we asked you to give us your thoughts on two building scenarios with several option considerations.
We really appreciate the thoughts and feedback we received. The main takeaways from this process include:
-Keep the high school campus near current facilities
-Keep neighborhood schools
-Need more space in the high school
-Be cost effective but build for the future
-Small class sizes
Our Long Range Facility Planning Team has taken our community’s thoughts very seriously. They have met and reviewed all of the results from the Thoughtexchange while also keeping in mind the following needs of the District:
-Parking at all buildings
-The need for larger Fine Arts facilities
-The need for a larger high school gymnasium
-A future Operating Levy
One factor that is very important in any building plan is the availability of viable land in our District. Many of the land options in our District are either very expensive or don’t have viable topography to build a school. So we are taking the approach to utilize the land we have to build our plan.
Please take a look at the website we created that highlights the top thoughts from the Thoughtexchange. Additionally, we have put together a results and insights report for review.
We will continue to work with this information and our next step is to draft a final option based on the feedback from our community and our District needs. We will present this final option to the community in a 3rd Thoughtexchange in early September. We hope you’ll participate!
Thank you for contributing to the success of our District. Your participation in this process is invaluable.
Sincerely,
Tim A. Ackermann
Superintendent