Architect reviews WHS options
By Mike Shands

Hundreds of community members, parents, teachers, administrators and elected officials attended a public input session to discuss plans for a new Watauga High School this week.

The session, held Oct. 24 in the WHS auditorium, featured a presentation by Jennifer Sisak of SfL+A Architects, the firm hired by the Watauga County Board of Education to help plan and design options for a new WHS. Sisak is the project manager.

She presented the three primary options for a new high school building and discussed how SfL+A  representatives arrived at those options.

Sisak said the plans are the result of input from a 20- to 30-member planning committee that included community members, educators, students and parents.

“We went through a process of about six weeks of talking about what a high school means, what are the objectives that you have for your community and what are the things that are important to this school and this district about educating these students,” she said.

One of the first things the committee discussed was how many students the new school would need to support. Sisak said she was looking at a school capacity model based on 75 to 85 percent utilization.

“That means how much of the time are your classrooms full of kids,” she said. “You can target one or the other or even a higher efficiency ratio if you want to.”

She said WHS has about 1,570 students now, but that number is projected to drop during the next decade to 15 years. The potential capacity of a new school will be between 1,470 and 1,666 students.

The committee used a North Carolina Department of Public Instruction formula for high school capacity standards to decide the number and size of classrooms, gymnasiums, auditoriums and other areas of the school.

Sisak said one of the major topics of high school construction is how well a building is organized. She displayed a model featuring a core area surrounded by major facilities such as a cafeteria, gym, auditorium and an administration/guidance area. Classrooms had a secondary relationship to the core and were more remote.

A campus layout should also feature separate bus and car parking, she said.

Sisak then discussed the three primary plans for a new high school, which feature two-story designs and the eventual demolition of the current building.

The first option involves constructing a new building on the existing parking lot, then putting a parking lot where the existing building is located. It would also involve placing temporary parking on top of the tennis courts and the practice field.

“This site is very challenging. It is very tight,” Sisak said.

The second option involves constructing a new building on the existing softball field and into the side of the hill next to it the field, then putting a new softball field, practice field and tennis courts where the existing building is located. Parking would remain about where it is now.

The third option involves the possibility of constructing a new building on the existing baseball field, putting parking in the existing building’s location and putting a new baseball field on the existing parking lot.

She also discussed a fourth option, which would involve constructing a new building behind the vocational area. This would involve moving about 70 feet of hillside, though.

That option would improve the amount of usable area on campus, though.

Sisak then discussed the school’s projected $56 million cost by using figures from the department of public instruction’s Web site on cost per square foot of construction.

She said recent bids for schools across the state have ranged from $127 to $186 per square foot and that she was figuring on about $150 per square foot for a new WHS building.

At that price a building with more than 263,000 square feet would result in a construction cost of more than $39,980,000. Several other aspects of construction would bring that total higher, though.

They include about $2 million for the potential of constructing in phases; more than $6.3 million in professional fees such as architecture, surveying, soil testing and construction testing; more than $2.8 million for fixtures, furniture and equipment; more than $1.87 million for technology such as wiring and computers; and other costs.

Sisak said that the architect team believes it can help decrease the $56 million total price tag by increasing the building’s efficiency and thus decreasing its square footage from 263,000 to 250,000.

That could lower the project’s total cost to between $45 million and $50 million.

She said that it would take about nine to 10 months to do the design work for the building and then about two years to construct it.