Sequim school leaders will look at its challenges and state of their buildings at a community forum on Feb. 20.
The meeting, set for 6:30 p.m. in the Sequim High School library, 601 N. Sequim Ave., will open with comments from superintendent Rob Clark, followed by comments from Sequim school principals regarding the district’s facilities, and bookended with a question-and-answer period.
The goal of the forum, Clark said at a Sequim School District school board meeting on Feb. 3, is to help educate the public about the district’s needs as he starts to put together a bond measure proposal for the November ballot — one that would address district infrastructure and facility improvements.
Clark said he hopes the forum attendees will give feedback to craft a top-10 priority list of facility needs.
“This is about moving forward,” Clark said of the forum. “There have been issues and mistakes and disagreements in the past around bond issues. We’ve got to acknowledge that, but we’ve also got to move on and not dwell in the past.”
Clark said that this will be the first of what he’s hoping will become a monthly community forum covering various topics during the school year. He’s aiming at using the third Thursday of each month during the school year to bring in members of the community to talk about different important district issuest.
One upcoming subject, Clark said, is changes to high school graduation requirements and the extra routes to graduation students have.
Fir Street progress
The school board heard an update from Matthew Klontz, City of Sequim assistant public works director, regarding the Fir Street construction project.
According to Klontz, sidewalks and parking lot entrance in front of the district office building at the corner of Sequim Avenue and Fir Street will be paved in the next two weeks, and will receive a “nice looking landscape feature in a short amount of time.”
Klontz added that the utility poles are scheduled to come down in late February, and that if all goes according to plan over the next six weeks or so, paving of Fir Street will begin during the week of spring break, which starts March 30.
At that point, Klontz said, the project will be “substantially completed.” There will still be some work to finish up, he added, but once paving is complete the major disruptive work will be essentially done.
That schedule, he said, means that there is no “hindrance” anticipated to the Irrigation Festival carnival on the district’s athletic fields along Fir Street in early May. All significant work should be done by then, Klontz said.
Klontz also told the board that a “speed table” will be added at the crossing between SHS and the annex building that hosts the band and choir classes and the Olympic Peninsula Academy, giving students a slightly raised crossing point that looks to force drivers to slow down and be highly visible. The road feature will include button-activated flashing beacons along the “table.”
The board complemented Klontz for the speed in which the project has been completed, which is currently set to be done well ahead of schedule. Klontz gave full credit to Interwest Construction for their efforts to complete the work, noting that their crew has “quite a few” SHS graduates who he said have been “highly invested in getting this done right.”
