A new high school in southwest Little Rock for 2,250 students in ninth through 12th grades will feature a three-story academic building, a 1,200-seat auditorium, multiple athletic fields and a community park.
Little Rock School District leaders and architects described the campus plans Monday to the Southwest Little Rock United for Progress community organization to solicit their ideas for the new school and to build support for a property tax extension that would help finance the $90 million new school and make improvements at 35 other campuses in the school system.
Superintendent Mike Poore told about 75 people, including two legislators and two members of the Little Rock Board of Directors, that a new, "top-notch" high school to replace McClellan and J.A. Fair high schools is the fulfillment of a long-standing promise and a district priority. He also said the new campus needs to be part of a larger, districtwide capital improvement program.
"If you as a bigger community don't buy into saying we are going to need this southwest high school, we've got a problem," Poore said. "Could the district scrape, cut, do more things to go build the high school? We could. But the problem is if you just do that and you don't [start to] tackle over $300 million worth of capital needs [throughout the district], we aren't doing right."
Poore has proposed that the district hold a special election this calendar year on extending by 14 years -- to 2047 -- the levy of 12.4 debt service property tax mills. Those 12.4 mills, which are part of the Little Rock district's overall 46.4 mill tax rate, will otherwise expire in 2033. The proposal, if approved by voters, wouldn't raise annual taxes for a property owner but would result in property owners paying the same annual tax rate for additional years.
The superintendent said the continued tax levy would generate about $160 million for construction. The district would use existing savings, its last year of state desegregation aid, and about $45 million from the continued tax levy for the southwest high school. The rest of the new money would be used at other campuses for projects such as replacing roofs, heating and air conditioning and lighting systems.
The money also would be used, he said, to repurpose the existing Fair and McClellan campuses. To fail to use those schools would let the community down, he added.
No decisions have been made about re-engineering those campuses, but one idea is to convert them to kindergarten-through-eighth-grade schools. The cost to make that change at McClellan, which has virtually no classroom windows and whose walls don't always connect to the floors, would be about $40 million, Poore said.
Pam Adcock, president of Southwest Little Rock United For Progress, asked why the district would save the McClellan campus and what would become of the Cloverdale Middle School -- if Cloverdale students are assigned to the McClellan site.
Poore said the McClellan site has an auditorium and athletic facilities and is a desirable location because of its adjoining neighborhoods.
District leaders are working with the Polk, Stanley, Wilcox architecture firm on the design of the new high school on a 55-acre site between Mabelvale Pike and Mann Road and behind the Home Depot and Wal-Mart stores.
Architects David Porter and Wesley Walls, who have met with students, faculty and parent groups to solicit ideas about the design, presented early plans for the campus, the front of which will face Mabelvale Pike.
The academic building is a three-story, L-shaped structure that would include a media center, dining space, an auditorium, and classrooms that would accommodate flexible seating and project-based learning activities. The back of one academic building would overlook the football stadium that would run parallel to Mann Road. The school's arena and auxiliary gym would be at the stadium's north end and a field house would be at the south end. Fields to accommodate baseball, softball, track and soccer, as well as tennis courts, are part of the plan, as is a community playing field and park setting.
Metro on 02/07/2017