SCHOOL NEWS

Inside the schools bond: Planning for a new Gladstone Elementary School

By JEN COWART
Posted 9/23/20

By JEN COWART Special to the Herald Editor's note: This is the second in a series of stories produced by Cranston Public Schools highlighting the specific projects that would be funded through a $147 million bond question going before voters on Nov. 3.

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SCHOOL NEWS

Inside the schools bond: Planning for a new Gladstone Elementary School

Posted
Special to the Herald

Editor’s note: This is the second in a series of stories produced by Cranston Public Schools highlighting the specific projects that would be funded through a $147 million bond question going before voters on Nov. 3. The school bond will be question No. 2 on the ballot.

This week’s spotlight school project is Gladstone Street Elementary School. In the district’s five-year plan, Gladstone School is slated to be demolished and a new school will be built further back on its property, allowing for the improved use of drop-off and pick-up spaces, parking and many new outdoor play options, including secure outdoor learning spaces.

The project will meet all current school construction requirements and codes, will be energy efficient, and will serve as a community hub on the eastern side of the city.

Gladstone Street Elementary School was built 68 years ago, in 1952. The average age of Rhode Island’s public school buildings is 56. At that time, Harry Truman was the president of the United States, and the country was in the early years of the Cold War, having only recently emerged from World War II.

The cavernous, three-story building houses approximately 520 students in cramped classrooms whose windows have little visibility to the outside and virtually no natural lighting coming inside. Although the school community is warm and welcoming, the building itself has a cold, institutional feel to it.

The kindergarten classrooms include fireplaces, which are no longer functional for heating the classrooms but take up significant space, leaving even less space for teaching and learning in a 21st-century manner.

As with many of Cranston’s other buildings, the heating system is inefficient and out of date. The electrical system is inefficient as well, with only the bare minimum number of plugs in classrooms and lack of ability to adequately support today’s technology. At any given time, the students do their collaborative, small group work out in the hallways on the floor, or work one-on-one with service providers in re-purposed storage closets.

Gladstone is a Title I school – a designation for schools with at least 40 percent of their population at the low-income level – and typically houses four classrooms at each grade level and a large population of multi-language learners in what is called the Sheltered ELL program.

The new Gladstone Street School will have the capacity to house up to 798 students and will have a warm, welcoming entryway that includes 21st-century security features. The new building will be designed to accommodate the highest standard of energy efficiency plus a new HVAC system which will meet and exceed COVID-19 recommendations, including secure operable windows which will meet all Rhode Island state building and fire codes as well as Northeast Collaborative for High Preformance Schools, or NE-CHPS, criteria.

The classrooms will be modernized to accommodate 21st-century teaching and learning, including acoustical treatments, varied lighting, new furnishings and educational technology. Each individual classroom will feature whole class instruction space while separate small group, one-on-one, and collaborative spaces will be available as well. There will be a state-of-the-art library and Global Learning Center as well as a flexible dining space appropriately sized for the school’s population. The plans also feature a dedicated gymnasium, which will be available to groups and organizations for community functions and league play.

Gladstone Street Elementary School currently houses the Cranston Family Center/Child Opportunity Zone (COZ), a support network that provides valuable resources for families in Cranston. The Family Center will have a new, dedicated space that will enable further development of support networks for families throughout the city.

This fall, Cranston voters will be asked to support a school construction bond that will allow the Cranston Public Schools to begin to renovate and update aging school facilities over a five-year period.

These recent months of COVID-19 have shown just how dire the need is for improvements to school facilities in Cranston, and the school district has been among the first at the table in Rhode Island with a comprehensive plan that will capitalize on state reimbursement opportunities.

The city is eligible to receive between 54 and 74 percent in reimbursement from the state, money that would be given to other communities had Cranston not been ready with its plans from the get-go. The Cranston Public Schools five-year plan has not only been recognized by the state, but the first project, the Eden Park Pathfinder Project completed in 2019, has been recognized both nationally and internationally and has shown both the city and the state what the rest of the schools can and will look like as Cranston Public Schools begins to take the much-needed steps towards modernization and expansion.

Cranston Public Schools leadership was very thoughtful in planning out these five projects, being certain to impact as many students in as many parts of the city and at as many educational levels as possible with the upgrades.

It is also important to note that the bond includes $14 million allotted to address district-wide potential health and safety issues in any other school building that may occur during the five-year period. This will allow qualifying projects to also be reimbursable if they are included in the plan.

The proposed five-year plan will help ensure that the city of Cranston will continue to draw families to its neighborhoods because of its schools. The school construction bond on the Nov. 3 election ballot will impact the students of today and for generations to come. It will impact property values across the city and will help to get the local economy back on its feet post-COVID-19, as the projects will provide many job opportunities.

The investment in the Cranston Public Schools five-year plan is an investment for the entire community and for the future of the city of Cranston.

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