FAIRBORN – Fairborn City School District officials are in the midst of planning two new facilities to serve students in kindergarten through fifth grade.
The process started with the district hiring an owner agent group to represent Fairborn City Schools, such as overseeing the timeline, budget and contracting work that will take place as the new Fairborn Intermediate School and Fairborn Primary School walls start going up. It secondly hired a commissioning agent to ensure that the proper HVAC, electrical, roofing, etc. work was taking place.
District officials are now focusing on establishing an educational vision among the schools, starting with Fairborn Primary School. With more than 1,200 children traveling through the hallways each day through the 130,000 square-foot facility, they asked “how can we make big seem small?”
The new Fairborn Primary School is envisioned to be two-story and include space to provide art and music classes to the youngest students of the district. The “classroom communities” concept will eliminate the traditional library system.
“We’ll have approximately eight classrooms with each group being its own community,” North said. “Between two communities, there will be a designated area where library or media resources will be located … Instead of one big, large library or media center, there will be several small media centers so the access to resources – whether technology or books – will be close at-hand.”
District officials are currently coordinating with city entities through the planning process, including the City of Fairborn’s water and street departments to gather information to provide to architects, as well as the police and fire departments to ensure the facility is built in the safest way possible. They have done so as part of a bigger mission, which is schematic design.
“That’s where the architects take all this information that they’ve gathered through educational visioning, through meeting with city personnel … so they can start looking at what needs to be addressed in coordination with what the city has and what the city’s plans are for streets, sewers and water, things like that,” North said. “[When] schematic design is completed, then we’ll move into developmental design. That’s when they start putting the finishing touches to the building.”
Upon the completion of developmental design, the district will distribute construction documents to the hired professionals to ensure that the information is correct. Once that green light is given, the project will go up for bid to construction companies.
The community will be invited to a ribbon cutting event within the spring months next year to signal the launch of the construction process. At that point, the sight – next door to the current Fairborn Primary School location – will be prepped and construction equipment will begin to appear.
“That’s when it really gets exciting – when you start seeing walls come up out of the ground,” he said, adding that 50 years will have passed since the district constructed a new building by the time the primary building is complete.
North said as the district first introduced the idea of constructing new buildings through a series of community meetings, citizens indicated that they desired facilities that were inviting, which is exactly what Fairborn City Schools is aiming to deliver.
“When the [ground breaking ceremony] comes, those are words we’re going to hear over and over again – how inviting the building is, how proud we are to have this building and how much this building is a focal point to show the positive growth and future we’re moving forward with in this community,” North said. “I think this building will be a symbol of that.”
