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K -12 Master Plan Lexington Public Schools 3. Why a new Master Plan is Necessary In order to be useful, Facilities Master Plans must be renewed periodically. A facilities master plan is essentially a framework to guide the maintenance, repair, upgrading, replacement or augmenting of facilities. The circumstances that dictate how this needs to occur over time will change over time, and so a Master Plan typically has a fixed life of 10 years or so before it needs to be renewed. This is particularly true for school districts, where the factors that dictate facilities needs, including enrollments, cannot be reasonably projected more than 10 years into the future. The last complete K -12 Master Plan undertaken for Lexington was the HMFH Master Plan Study completed in March 1997. That report is now more than 10 years old, and many of the assumptions that went into it, including the enrollment projections, are out of date. As an example, enrollments at the High School at that time were 1,443, projected to increase to 1,842 in 10 years. By comparison, the HS enrollment now (2008 -09) is 2012 and projected to remain fairly steady. The Elementary School Master Plan: An Elementary School Master Plan study was completed by Design Partnership of Cambridge in 2006. That report was completed at the time that the last of two new elementary schools, the Harrington and Fiske , were completing construction. The study examined the educational space needs on a district -wide basis and the facilities needs at the four remaining older schools and at old Harrington, which was serving as swing space during construction of Fiske School. The recommendation was made to undertake major projects, either to build replacement schools or to renovate existing schools to as -new standards, at three of the four older elementary schools. The expectation, based on enrollment projections, was that declining elementary school enrollments would make advisable the reduction to five in the number of elementary schools operated by Lexington and thereby the closing of one of the four older schools. This current K -12 Master Plan builds on the work of that study. As regards the long -term elementary needs of the school district, this study is limited to examining the potential impact of changed enrollment projections relative to what was the basis for the 2006 study. In addition, because the availability of school building funding assistance from the state is a matter of uncertainty, it is unclear at what point the Town of Lexington will be willing to undertake the major projects recommended in the prior study. With this in mind, the current study examines what will be needed to allow the four older elementary schools to remain in service for up to ten years prior to commencement of major projects. Design Partnership of Cambridge