From: David E. Rose, Long time College Park resident, real estate agent, and activist October 2006 edition - copyright ©2006 Community Paper. All rights reserved.
See this article at www.Community-Paper.com/Archives/WhyAHighSchool.html
WHY A HIGH SCHOOL?
From: David E. Rose, Long time College Park resident, real estate agent, and activist
Two months ago I wrote an article titled “High School or Power Center” that outlined what was happening with the College Park Leisure Home Park on Maury Road. Since then the new owners have given the tenants their six months notice and announced their intention to redevelop the property. Meanwhile the Orange County Public Schools have stated that they are still in negotiations with the owners to purchase the property for the renovated Edgewater High School and that a decision should be reached soon, in fact possibly before you read this article. Today I want to put forward the case for using the property for the new Edgewater High School.
Edgewater High School is scheduled to be renovated for the school year 2010 using the sales tax money, and $110 million dollars have been budgeted for the project. Over the past three years a sub committee of the Edgewater Foundation has been working with the School Board to develop an outline for the renovation. One of the frustrating things about the project, or any school project, is that there exist so many laws, rules, court orders, policies, etc. that dictate what can be done that little room is left for innovation. If I were to go into all of these it would take much more space than could be included in a simple article so I will just set out the guidelines. The new Edgewater High School is to be a Comprehensive High School with a student body of 2766 students which is the same as all the other high schools in Orange County.
As you may know the OCPS is using a standard design for all new schools as part of their efficiency methods. A new high school requires sixty acres to accommodate the standard design; Edgewater is currently sitting on twenty nine acres thus creating a very large challenge. Over the past three years there have been numerous attempts by both the OCPS facilities department and outside architectural firms to fit a high school on to the existing acreage, there is also a requirement that certain existing buildings must remain. After all of that effort it was determined that it was in fact not possible to fit sixty acres of school onto twenty nine acres and in November of last year the School Board instructed the staff to take the necessary actions to purchase the nine acres immediately north of the school which is currently used as a shopping center and to conduct a study to determine if additional land would be required.
A committee of the OCPS was formed including a cross section of community members, City of Orlando real estate and planning managers, and Edgewater High School staff, and chaired by the OCPS facilities department. This committee met weekly for about three months and studied ways to innovatively maximize the use of land.
The most obvious option was to simply go higher, since the standard high school is two stories if Edgewater were three or four stories we would reduce the amount of land needed. While this is a good strategy there is only so much land that can be saved using this strategy. The foot print of the total building element in the standard school is just eight acres, so if we used only one acre for building and went straight up sixteen stories we would still only reduce the land required by seven acres. So while a portion of the new Edgewater will likely be more than two stories only a little land savings can be realized.
Another obvious strategy would be to build a parking garage instead of using just surface parking. School administrators had serious concerns over safety issues of students in a parking building but in the final analysis it is a simple dollars and cents decision. To build a parking garage would cost about $15,000 a space, private developers on the committee confirmed this was a reasonable number, and the cost of land for surface parking would have to exceed $2 million per acre for a garage to be cost effective. So the new Edgewater will probably not have a parking garage.
So with out going into more detail the point here is that the committee seriously and with an open mind tried to figure ways to build the new Edgewater High School on the thirty eight acres that would be the existing site and the shopping center. At the end of the day it was determined that not only would the school not fit on the thirty eight acres but if we were to try and make that work we could not even think about addressing ways to improve traffic concerns of the immediate community.
During this whole process there have been developed trial plans for the redevelopment utilizing the additional eleven acres of the mobile home park, over an acre of which is across Maury Road. While Edgewater still will not have all of the amenities of the standard high school most of the standard elements can be built on the resulting forty nine acres. Additionally by adding the property the school gains direct access to Maury Road. By utilizing the Maury Road access the traffic impact of the school on the immediate neighborhood and on Edgewater Drive becomes much more manageable.
The bottom line is simply that we are rebuilding Edgewater High School and will have to live with what rebuild. In order to do a job that is fair to all the future Edgewater students and just importantly fair to all of the community we need to utilize both the shopping center and mobile home property. We all need to encourage the School Board to make this commitment.
David E. Rose is a College Park Resident and Community Activist.
E-mail him at David.Rose@Realtor.com
or Anne Geiger, Orange County Public Schools, School Board, District 6
407-317-3236 (office), 407-399-1768 (cell) or e-mail geigera@ocps.net
