Multiple School Options Pondered

Connecticut Post
By Susan Silvers
August 8, 2005

BRIDGEPORT — School play areas on the roof to save space? A high school next to a community college so students from one facility can make use of the other?

How about a school attached to a recreational facility that neighborhood residents could also use?

These are features that conceivably could be in the future for Bridgeport's schools as the first of four new elementary schools planned by the city begins rising on State Street.

Four city officials who attended a Washington, D.C., conference on "Great Schools by Design" in late July said they were inspired to envision how Bridgeport can plan more creatively as the city embarks on a massive project of new school construction and renovating other facilities.

"The conference really did deliver on its theme," said Supt. of Schools John J. Ramos.

Under the auspices of the Mayor's Institute on City Design, the Bridgeporters joined representatives from St. Louis, Oklahoma City and Manchester, N.H., to meet with architects and development experts who critiqued existing school development plans and offered ideas as to how to make them more useful to the community at large.

Ramos said he was captivated by how a small Minnesota school was expanded into a total community resource with an addition that included recreation, social services and health facilities.

Mayor John M. Fabrizi said he was struck by the concept of possibly combining school facilities with housing.

And Public Facilities Director George Estrada said he was intrigued by the possibility of locating a high school near a community college — where peak-performing adolescents can take advanced classes and college students studying education issues can get hands-on experience.

John Butkus, the school system's director of operations, said the experts told Bridgeport officials to make the most of its urban resources. "Bridgeport, whether it realizes it or not, is a city," he said.

Some of the concepts weren't totally foreign to the Bridgeport representatives, as they have tried to integrate into plans for four new elementary schools some health services and computer laboratories that can be accessible to the community after school hours.

But other suggestions — such as building underground parking on the amount of valuable land needed to construct the building or including swimming pools for general recreation — were discarded because state reimbursement regulations wouldn't cover them, Butkus recalled.

The Bridgeport conference participants said city officials should revisit reimbursement policies with the state for future school buildings and renovations because seizing land for school projects, as the highly developed city routinely has to do, costs the state money and hurts the city.

"That can't happen anymore," Fabrizi said, pointing to the bitterness sparked when the city took property for several of the planned elementary schools, particularly in the East End.

"You can't deteriorate your tax base — never mind the neighborhood," he observed, by taking land off the tax rolls to make way for schools.

Assembling enough property to build the $53 million Cesar A. Batalla School at State Street and Clinton Avenue, which finally began rising a couple of weeks ago, was a major factor that the completion date will be so much later than the originally projected 2004.

The city could also explore getting grants from other sources for features not covered by state reimbursements, or work out joint arrangements with other institutions.

Still, with schools so costly, experts say the state will continue to play the most critical financing role.

Ramos, a former deputy state education commissioner, said he doesn't think rigid reimbursement criteria stem from deep-rooted aversion to flexibility in Hartford. Rather, he said, the state Department of Education probably set the limits with the specific needs of the school day in mind.

"It makes sense that Bridgeport enter into a dialogue with the state about what we may be able to do," he said.