Maximize Funds and Improve Student/Staff Safety

2022 and 2023 K-12 school remodeling is about maximizing funds and improving communicable and physical safety of the students and staff. Right now, schools have an opportunity to spend government funds to help their schools be safer through ESSER Funds. Safer is subjective or flexible to what is more pressing in a District, whether it is cleaner indoor air, reconfigured space or furniture for social distancing,

There are so many decisions to make as schools get back to in-person learning and doing everything they can to make school safer, catch students up from remote learning, and expand mental health accommodations, among other needs. School leaders, administrators, and teachers have so much on their plates, oh, and are also dealing with volatile views from parents about how to handle it all.

Michigan School Board of Education (BOE) members have lots of decisions to make in regard to Bond Programs for school improvements. One of them being how to sell the Bonds.

School Districts are facing pressure to incorporate technology into their curriculum to compete with other institutions who have already adopted 21^st Century and New Tech programs. However, miles of wiring, hardware, software, white boards, wireless projectors and hand held devices aren’t the only technological concerns of modern schools.

What do a pea, a quarter, a mothball, and a golf ball have in common? You probably guessed it, they are all used to describe sizes of hail. The bigger the diameter of hail, the bigger the damage it causes, especially for School Districts. You may wonder why a school would be worse off than most other structures, but when you consider that most Districts have a campus with multiple buildings in the same area, the cost to restore after a hail storm can add up quickly.

At the 2018 FIRST Robotics World Championships in Detroit, there were 601 teams from Michigan. To say that robotics is growing quickly is an understatement. Through grants, bond programs, and sponsorships, Michigan School Districts are making room on their campuses to support those teams. The makerspace, as these rooms are more broadly called, can include a robotics lab. These areas are “dependent on the size of the robotics involved”, according to Douglas Rich of spaces4learning.com in his article, Designing Robotics Labs.   “There is no difference between learning to program a demonstration robot or full-size robotics arm; so many schools choose the smaller robots to save space and money”.

Preparing for a Bond Election is critical to school construction projects because if the election isn’t successful, there is nothing to construct. Therefore, Wolgast has developed Pre-Bond Election Services to set up School Districts for building success.  While we haven’t won them all on the first try, we have maintained a 92% success rate for schools we’ve helped over the past 5 years.