Warren County School District’s high schools are less than half-full… or more than half-empty.

The Warren County Board of School Directors heard from Jon Thomas of Thomas and Williamson regarding the district’s building utilization rates at their regular meeting Monday night.

The detailed materials related to that presentation are posted on the district’s website – www.wcsdpa.org – under the BoardDocs tab.

“The goal here was to get the baseline utilization rate for your schools,” Thomas said.

While evaluations were presented for elementary and secondary levels, the board had told Thomas to focus more on the secondary data.

In the data, each high school is analyzed separately by capacity and utilization broken down by areas of study. Core classes – English language arts, math, science, and social studies – generally have higher utilization rates while specials like arts and music are lower.

A few programs – including physical education and special education – vary in their utilization rates.

All schools count students in grades nine through 12. The numbers for the middle-high schools (all but Warren Area High School) include students in sixth, seventh, and eighth grades.

For those rates, Thomas suggested a number in the 80s is reasonable, while something in the 90s is possible, but does not afford much flexibility.

“You have to balance out… account for the inherent inefficiencies that come in any secondary school schedule,” he said. “90 percent is extremely ambitious. I don’t want to get to 90 percent. I want to see this run somewhere in the 80s.”

At the bottom of each school’s materials is an evaluation of “space utilization.”

Some buildings have spaces that are not used at all.

At Youngsville, there were 1,733 student-periods available in unused classrooms. For WAHS, the unused space represented 1,008 student-periods. Sheffield had 788.

The data for Eisenhower shows no unused spaces.

The buildings’ “total student-period capacity” is listed, then the “scheduled student periods” and “surplus student-period capacity.”

“All of your schools are significantly under their max operating capacities,” Thomas said.

The building that is closest to meeting it’s total capacity – including unused spaces – is Eisenhower Middle High School at 57 percent, according to Thomas and Williamson.

Next is Warren Area High School at 51 percent, then Youngsville Middle High School at 37, and Sheffield Area Middle High School at 30.

The total capacity of the four schools is 21,297 student periods. Warren has 6,854, Youngsville 5,657, Eisenhower 4,429, and Sheffield 4,357.

The scheduled usage of the schools is 3,465 at Warren, 2,538 at Eisenhower, 2,108 for Youngsville, and 1,296 for Sheffield, for a district total of 9,407.

That usage rate equals a district-wide 44 percent.

The surplus capacity at Youngsville is the highest in the district at 3,549 – higher than any building’s usage.

Warren’s surplus of 3,389 is higher than the usage at any school that is not WAHS. The scheduled usage of Youngsville and Sheffield combined is 3,404.

Leaving out the unused spaces, the district is running at 55 percent of capacity, Thomas said.

“You have holes in your utilization in every facility,” he said. “That means that there is the opportunity to look at some reconfiguration.”

“The reconfiguration could be moving one school to join another,” he said. “Moving parts of one school to join another.”

“As I understand it, it’s not a question of looking for ways of saving money with staff costs or reducing your staff, you’re looking for ways to get the students to your staff so you can offer a more consistent education to your students,” he said. “It’s very hard to offer some of the more diverse courses to a smaller student body.”

“Our strategy then will be to look at some of these lower utilization rates… and find a way to balance those out and maybe raise the overall utilization even up to 20 points higher,” Thomas said.

As a next step, Thomas said the company would present options to the board. “For each scenario there will be two different sub-options – one without using the unscheduled spaces and one with incorporating those into the mix.”

Board member Arthur Stewart asked Thomas to include an evaluation of the district’s elementary schools in the project.

“I think we should keep our options open for looking at all the schools,” he said. “The board hasn’t staked out any thoughts at all yet whether we would make any changes to classes or buildings.”

Thomas fielded questions from the board.

“Our district is so large… did you figure the distance that students would have to travel?” Marcy Morgan asked.

“Yes,” Thomas said. “Right now, we are anguishing over it. If it wasn’t for the fact that you are so spread out, we would probably be done with the study by now.”

He said a previous analysis of the district’s facilities used an “average time on the bus.”

“This is a ‘maximum time on the bus’ problem,” he said. “We have to make sure that every child gets to school in a reasonable amount of time.”

Mary Passinger and Donna Zariczny asked Thomas if the impact on teachers – how many classes they would have to prep for and if they would be sharing classrooms – is taken into account in the utilization study.

Thomas said sharing spaces is a “collegiate-style” approach. “I don’t really want you to have to go there. Just about all of your teachers have their own classroom. We want to stay there.”

Superintendent Stewart addressed the concern of the number of preps.

“Our principals are looking at that every year… ‘What are the pressures on staff?'” she said. “We can get that in front of the board.”

“That topic has come up in our planning discussions,” Thomas said. “If you look through my reports, you can see that there are some teachers that are doing some really heavy lifting.”

Thomas did not make any reconfiguration proposals to the board on Monday, nor were there any action items on Monday’s agenda related to building utilization.