A Super’s Take on Education

The school year and, hopefully, the winter are starting to slip away. We have had a fantastic year- improving and performing well in so many areas.

By Daren Christianson
Langdon Area School

We are so blessed to have the local media coverage that we have ranging from the radio program on KNDK 1080 each Monday at 1:40 to the local paper covering a great variety of our students’ accomplishments.
I am sure many noticed the Request for Proposal that is published in the Republican this week. The purpose of publishing this notice is to allow the school board to see a variety of portfolios (or proposals) from firms or groups that would like to enter into an agreement with the district to investigate, develop and implement improvements and repairs that would either make our school buildings more efficient or help the district take care of required deferred maintenance to our buildings.
The Langdon Area School District currently maintains 129,218 GSF (gross square feet) with 48,802 GSF at the elementary building and 80,416 GSF at the high school building. The district conducted a survey during the 2014-15 school year to determine if there was interest in the community to discontinue use of the elementary building and add on to the high school building so that all of our student population would be at one site. At that time, there was an overwhelming response that the district should invest in the current buildings and not build on to the high school. Since the survey, the district has made significant improvements to the elementary site. The improvements include, but are not limited to, new student lockers, new cabinetry, asbestos removal by cleaning out the ventilation tunnels, and relining of sewer piping. The latest estimate on replacing the current square footage is $25,252,500 for the high school and $12,200,500 for the elementary school.
The school board believes that the current structures are solid and investment worthy, but many parts are aging and ending their life-cycle. Also, many items, if replaced, would be more efficient and would pay for the cost of their replacement. We will be questioning many factors that affect student achievement such as air quality, ventilation, temperature/humidity, lighting, acoustics and overall environment. The district currently utilizes electric heat at the high school building and a hot water natural gas boiler system in the elementary school.
Once it is determined who we will be working with, we will be able to get some hard data that we can use to determine the next steps for our school district.