The Appleton Area School District Board of Education met 04/28/2025. During the meeting they received a brief update on the plans to repurpose the Columbus Elementary School building.
I’ve prepared a transcript of the discussion for download:
AASD Superintendent Greg Hartjes told the Board that several administrators had submitted proposals for using the space at Columbus. All of them were viable options, but they all came with renovation needs. Renovation needs entailed costs to the District and also the time of the Facilities and Operations Department. There were no funds budgeted for renovations and the Facilities and Operations Department was going to continue to be very busy with the referendum projects for the next 6 months. As a result, Superintendent Hartjes did not want to move forward with a remodeling project until they determined exactly how they wanted to use the space.
He said the one thing they were certain of is that they were going to expand the RISE program which is a program currently housed at Columbus for elementary high special needs students.
Additionally, they may use some of the space for office purposes, but they did not want to spend any dollars on renovations in the short term.
He indicated that District staff would put together some type of rubric that would score the various proposals they had received, and in 6 to 9 months they would start looking at how best to fill that space in the long-term.
Board member Oliver Zornow hoped that as they thought about how to use the space they would elevate the voices they had heard from the community and use it in a way that benefited the kids in the area [which I took to be the area around the Columbus building].
Board member Kris Sauter asked if they would need to add additional staff if they were expanding the RISE program. Superintendent Hartjes said that the RISE program would need to be staffed appropriately and the number of staff members was associated with the number of students. He was going to have Executive Director of Special Education Amy Steiner provide more information about that at a future Board meeting.
Board member Sauter also asked if there were any renovations that would be required to expand the RISE program. Superintendent Hartjes said that there were but added, “As we know, expanding the RISE program saves us dollars from not having to send students out of the district. And so that is an option that has a return on investment, I guess you could say, whereas our other options are clearly a budget outlay that don’t come with any savings.”
View full meeting video here: https://aasd.granicus.com/player/clip/63
View full agenda packet here: https://d3n9y02raazwpg.cloudfront.net/aasd/44d1c92d-1a14-11f0-955d-005056a89546-2171d860-3ac4-49db-84a5-200d91432c4c-1745941013.pdf
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