The District 150 School Board didn’t vote on the city’s proposal tonight to build a new school at Wisconsin and Frye, but the outcome is just short of certain: forget it.

School Design and Construction Committee members Guy Cahill (also district treasurer) and Marty Collier (Cat-employed architect) gave a short presentation, then took questions from the school board, some of which they answered immediately but most of which they plan to report back next week.

During the presentation, Cahill raised questions about the city’s land acquisition assessment; he said the city expects to acquire homes in the Glen Oak School area at market value (three times the assessed value), whereas the school board estimated higher than market value rates. He also raised questions about the “geometry of the site,” saying it “may or may not lend itself to what ultimately is planned.” He wants to have an educational expert compare and contrast the two sites for suitability, and he has questions about what all the city will be paying for — specifically, he wants to compare what the city paid for in the Valeska-Hinton agreement with what is being proposed now.

Collier reported on what’s coming out of the workshops he’s conducting with the School Design and Construction Committee. He said first of all that, since it’s going to be a “community school,” it’s going to need to be designed differently than a standard elementary school. Because of the mix of uses, the space will need to be “distributed widely” — in other words, it should be one-story instead of multi-story. This creates “segmentation” that keeps very young children from comingling with older children, and keeps the children separated from the “community” part of the school that would include a health clinic, for instance. He also mentioned there would need to be quite a bit of space devoted to (you guessed it) parking and bus queueing.

The questions from the board members were far from neutral or evenhanded. A lot of them were worded negatively: e.g., “what sports fields would be eliminated if we went with the Glen Oak School site?” “What programs will be lost by going to a smaller footprint?” It was pretty obvious the only purpose of their questions was to get information that will help them build a case against the current school site and for the park site.

There were a couple of interesting points, however. New board member Debbie Wolfmeyer stressed that, in comparing the two sites, the school board should only consider the land the district will actually own — which would be ten acres at the park site or ten acres at the school site — because the district will have no control over the land the park district owns, even though it’s adjacent to the proposed site. For instance, she brought up that the park already plans to replace one of the ball diamonds for a parking lot, so there’s no guarantees the other ball diamond will be there forever.

Also, new board president David Gorentz said, “The building plan and site plan should be driven by the programmatic plan. Until you have a program plan, you don’t know how much space you really need.” Since the program plan won’t be completed until this Wednesday, and the school board announced their selection of the park site back in March, I found Dr. Gorentz’s statement to be a tacit admission that the school board has been going about site selection completely backwards.

The bottom line is, the school board will rebuff the city’s offer and build the new school at Glen Oak Park like they planned all along. It’s in the cards.