We live in an amazing community, a community that believes in education and will do what
it takes to make sure our young people are going to be ready for the world that they're
going to live in.
Our schools play a big role in that.
Our school facilities play an even more important role.
And while our schools were built in the 50s and the 60s and the early 70s, as a community
we've continued to redesign those facilities to make sure they're effective for our learning
that's going on in the classroom.
To make sure that our teachers have the best settings to make sure the learning is occurring
for our kids and our kids will be ready for the world they live in.
In the fall of 2014, a community task force went deep into the study of looking at our
educational needs and our current facilities.
And they put together a plan that they presented to the school board to say, this is what we
believe needs to occur to make sure our facilities are ready for the 21st century that we're
living in.
In January of 2015, the school board approved the plan.
That plan identified $124.9 million of improvements that we need to take a look at as a school
district to make sure we are ready for our future.
As you think about it, things are changing at warp speed around us and in education,
it feels like we're always playing catch up.
And I think with the Dynapublic Schools, we've actually stopped the train and we've gotten
off of the train and we've really taken a very in-depth look at where education is going
and what is most important for our students to know and be able to do after they graduate
from Edina High School.
For the smaller kids, we'd like to see teachers be able to access the kids and their time in
a more flexible way that better meets their needs.
For the older kids, they need space to collaborate with one another.
The teachers need the ability to recognize what kids are doing and where they need help
and to be able to work with them where they are.
And our current fixed system just doesn't allow them that kind of access, particularly
as we're asking for more and more from our teachers all the time.
We need to be able to work more efficiently with our children.
Having a safe and secure learning environment is an important part of our educational mission.
Despite our schools being built in the 50s, 60s and 70s, a very different time around
security, our district has always taken steps to make sure we have a secure environment for
our students, staff and community.
This referendum question takes that next step to ensure we continue to place security as
a high priority.
There's a lot you can do with a well thought out design that's not overbearing or intrusive
and technology that's fairly invisible that provides the students, when they feel safe,
they have less to worry about and it allows the administration to provide for the security
to control flow, to control who comes in and who goes out.
Us being involved in doing that, both thinking it through with our perspective and how we
would respond, it just meshes well together.
Our school district recognizes our buildings are not the newest in the state and yet we've
taken pride and we've been purposeful in making sure the infrastructure of each of our schools
is kept at a high standard.
We continue to place that as a high priority and that will be part of the improvement process
of this referendum question.
The biggest aspect that we're going to be able to address is to provide some artificial
turf both at the high school and at the community center that is going to be able to address
the overuse on our grass fields and obviously take away that overuse concern.
Our fields are heavily used because we do not have the number of fields to accommodate
all the different programming options we have at Edina High School and also throughout
the district in terms of our programming.
We can use artificial turf non-stop, that's going to really enhance the playing conditions
for our students and also our student athletes at Edina.
As we look to the future, we want to take advantage of all of our learning spaces both
indoor and outdoor.
Our outdoor spaces provide great opportunities for students not only to play and exercise
but also in the area of learning.
Spaces are not only indoor, they're outdoor places for students to learn.
Our transportation facilities also need an update.
Our current site is limited.
We're limited in how we can store our buses, how we can make sure they're safe and how
we can serve them.
We need to look at expanded options to make sure we are able to meet the transportation
needs of the next generation of Edina Public Schools.
We are in a very dynamic time educationally, a time of opportunity, a time of new ways
of students learning and making sure that they are going to be ready for the world they
live in.
Included in that is how we use space.
Space is no longer just a classroom and while classrooms continue to be an important part
of the learning environment, we can take a look at classroom and learning spaces in
a very different way.
When we think of how instruction is delivered, our buildings for so very many years were
built around this idea of cells and bells.
In other words, you've got hallways with classrooms on either side.
The classrooms are all the same and we use it for first graders, we use it for fifth
graders.
And it's hard to know 21st century learning when you're in really a 19th century space
which was built on industrialization and efficiency.
So cells and bells is really that piece that says we don't have a lot of flexibility, we
have sort of one model and this is what it is and our space sort of dictates that.
I believe that our facilities were built for a different era of education.
Now in the 21st century and now that we're really moving forwards, education has a lot
more technology built into it and also just a lot of the learning models are changing
such as the blended format and the flipped classroom format.
So our spaces really need to evolve as education also evolves.
Students come to the hub of school for different reasons.
They come for quietly reading, they come to meet with their friends, collaborate, they
come to gather information, they come for service here and providing different spaces
here helps us meet the needs of all the students and staff here.
One of the things that I'm eager about in the referendum coming up in the opportunity
for your diner schools is to sort of break down some barriers and allow kids to be able
to collaborate together and to work together and not have a wall between them to do that,
either a metaphorical wall or an actual physical wall.
The new trends in education are for fab labs and makerspaces and what that allows for is
for students to imagine, to be innovative, to create, to design and actually build and
construct things and have choice and flexibility in their learning.
It would truly be exciting to have safe, secure, dedicated spaces that all of our students
are involved, especially in extracurricular activities, really could take advantage of.
It's really hard to move everybody forward if we're working in hallways, working in spaces
that just were not designed to accommodate that particular kind of activity or that kind
of work.
I think one benefit to students in their learning would be just the fact that kids get to be
more open and free to move around and find a learning space that's better suited for
them at different times during the day.
We can do that a little bit in our classrooms with different furniture, but if you have
it open, there's just a lot more space.
We already see that happening in small ways and in gentle ways throughout our schools.
Ways where students can break out into smaller areas, ways in places where we can have students
gather in larger group areas, different applied learning spaces.
While the classroom will continue to be important, we know we can flex the current space we have
in new ways to make sure our students are really getting that applied learning experience,
that collaborative opportunities, that individual learning time, and yet they still have the
large group and small group spaces.
By doing some changes in our schools, we know that that dynamic time in education will become
an opportunity of great learning for our young people.
We're truly trying to educate students for a future that is yet to exist.
I know that the workforce requires kids to collaborate much more, requires kids to be
able to work together, be able to problem solve together.
If we had facilities of bigger classrooms or taking down some of the walls between classrooms,
we can share students more.
This school district has a strong tradition of placing learning in young people as a priority.
This has been part of that story.
We've always made sure our facilities are great for learning today and tomorrow.
Since the 1990s, we've been making building improvements to ensure that this occurs, and
each one of these referendums has complimented the other.
So as we look to the 2015 referendum, we know that we're going to see benefits for our learners
today and into the 2020s.
Educationally, Edina Public Schools is known as defining excellence.
In this referendum, we're not only transforming spaces, we are advancing excellence.
