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Keene High School Bathroom Renovation Project Public Hearing

Added Apr 16, 2024 •

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From the Keene Board of Education Meeting for April 9, 2024 - Keene High School Bathroom Renovation Project Public Hearing LGIA, 43 Arch Street, Keene, NH Transcription available upon request.

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open the public hearing of the Keene Board of Education purpose of tonight's public hearing is to hear a proposal for withdrawing some funds from the building in facilities Expendable trust fund we're doing this because one of the proposals in the original budget this year was for renovations to the main hallway bathroom here at the high school with the goal of bringing it more in line with current practices should reduce vandalism in the area I'm going to get some of the details wrong so I'm not going to go into deeply but it's actually it's a pretty exciting project it's on the board fully supported but for budgetary reasons we did ultimately take it out of the initial budget proposal that the public past with the hope that some alternate funding could be found and we are still hopeful that at least some of this will be covered that way but ultimately if it's not we want to make sure the Administration has the resources needed to move forward for the projects so we're here to discuss the pros and cons of making that face pain trust fund money available and as I said Tim Roar see if I can give a much better overview of the project that were talking about so I will hand it over to him thank you George and thank you school board for being Innovative and the facilities committee to come up with these projects to allow change to happen at this high school and it's important we're trying to create a better restaurant at the high school so it's a restroom for positive change just a few of the problems that we're having I don't know if you been reading the news if you have kids in the high school but we have a situation where there is often vandalism in our bathrooms to the point where we went months with soap dispensers in the hallways we couldn't keep soap dispensers on the wall I just passed the PO to replace two cracked toilets this isn't just Keen also if you have a student they may have talked to you what it's like in our bathroom I have one student who tries to avoid going to the bathroom and another stood says it's not that bad but don't hang out there that shouldn't be what our kids are saying we want them free to go so for those reasons we started to look at a solution and there's a hole plethora of studies and evidence that shows this is about problem and I will cite some article from London about bathrooms that are specifically designed to stop anti-social and bullying Behavior in that facility that's what inspired this though it's not exactly the same so you'll see in this particular study 40% of girls at high school avoided visiting the toilet while they went to the high school if as adult we worked at a place we couldn't feel comfortable to go to the bathroom we wouldn't stay there long these kids have to go to school think about what we're dealing with here and and boys identified it as the place to do something wrong so we know we wanted to increase privacy meaning let students feel safe to use the restroom and but we wanted to increase Supervision in the common area of the bath when you're not using it as a bathroom we want to decrease vandalism and we wanted the bathroom to no longer be a place to socialize or hide but rather a place to go and and that's our goal we think we can change the culture here with this change and it's not cheap and it's built to last and built for maintenance concerns as well so here's some real examples and we did not do everything they doing these and we like some of it but not others so you can see open areas you'll see this in all these examples and these are stall base so they're just basically stalls and you go in there single-use you want to go in there you're going to pull any privacy to do whatever you want by yourself but the next person that goes in there if it's destroyed they're going to finger you as the person who did it and we're going to have you going in there right so maybe we'll get some retribution when get destroyed and you'll see common themes and Keene High School's new design we took a bunch of research looked at different stop this bathroom design has a boys and girls it's not fueled by a genderless bathroom although there's no issue if someone identifies any which way because you're in the bathroom by yourself privately so that becomes a non without having to play that open common areas we wanted to easy to supervise do have cameras individual toilet rooms not stalls why do we want that we couldn't find a stall that would last stalls are made out of metal with cardboard centers they would be dented stalls are made out of formica put the marker on them we're done stalls are made out of plastic much like the chair this gentleman sitting in only sticker we can't even keep those in elementary schools cuz once they get scratch there's no resurfacing saying them and they never look good or clean up again so we we got rid of that idea Vape sensors included in every toilet room so not one of the middle every single one stop for proof helpful the emails or text the people in the building going off right now at a time stamp person comes out camera hazard your it'll still available we don't have to pee all over our seats just because we're going to single-serve bathrooms so they're still here that's part of her think materials we have your thing that are super easy to clean and lasts for 30 years and we're talkin blackwall just like the wall over there easy to paint people mark on it you just paint it up I think I hit all that to our design looks like this is a top-down view you can see on the your right side is the Ladies Room the left side is the men's room still have urinals and there's no hard divider between them it's a low wall where you wash your sink I think you can see that more in this few this one there might help you see that so the sink goes down the middle of traffic think you can see the other side from the sink is open it's not like you have to stare at somebody when you're watching a hand there's a privacy panel there but it's open there's I have a vendor from a white noise manufacturer who's going to put white noise in there or we might try music so that you can't really hear in the stall outside of the stove we want private safe secure how do we pay for this is a $784,000 bathroom design not cheap we had in their budget like George had mentioned we took it out thinking this is how we go about it we have 1.25 million roughly in our building maintenance Expendable trust fund usable for this purse we need 780 4000 I'm estimating that about half of it will take from this year Surplus so we'll only be withdrawing let's take 400,000 from that fund this fun I don't read call withdrawing money from this Fund in my tenure in this job but I believe you did in the early 2000s for some boiler work was the last time money came out of this fund the boiler work right here in the school for very similar purposes so that's all I got questions or comments yakult thank you thank you Tim and I think the flexibility the bathrooms are important in many projects that I've been involved with there is more ladies than men bathroom if there is roughly the same cuz it seems to be that that's produced at the equity it so if if there's a big line for for the girls in the women's bathrooms say it's okay to go and use the man that they're empty what's the intention enforcing new rules on gender neither side would be labor labeling them gender our view is that people are more comfortable still going in a gendered bathroom that they don't really want to share even in many workplaces however there's no reason to support that the rule that they have to support is only one person in the bathroom at a time if they support that and students and staff report any van liver problems as soon as they go in to a stall will know who the last person was in there and I think it's going to solve a lot of those problems of gender use at all okay Tim remind me please at committee last week you mentioned that there was either an outside firm or agency that really commended The District in in your office and and can do Leon the design and the plan here and I say that for for two reasons one because I think that's important to note for the public hearing that this was well thought out so if you can touch on that and then to just to let you know recognize you know your office and and Ken's office with the hard work that you've done so can you work with a firm to do this it really hasn't caught on in this area for this reason for these reasons their stuff similar nothing just like this in our area and we worked with the designer as you said and we sent that to an engineer mechanical engineer do the fixtures and all the mechanics of it and we got an email unsolicited directly to us saying how excited they were about the project and that they hope we collect data and we need to present at the next facilities Mass conference which is our plan so that was nice to get and so our design crew super excited and are itching to have their name associated with this project that is great thank you Tim thank you further questions or comments all right. Thank you Tim and that will include public hearing we will as a board we will be visiting this later on in our agenda to take any actions that the board chooses to to take as a result of this

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