There is a lot of idea-sharing and collaboration involved in designing a new school.
When Lincoln Public Schools officials were in the process of drafting plans for two new high schools, they traveled to buildings in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas and Colorado to get ideas.Â
Features at Lincoln Northwest High School — a rooftop garden, digital bulletin boards and innovation spaces — were eventually inspired by those trips.
Now, a school district on the East Coast looking to replace an aging middle school is looking to LPS for some similar inspiration.
The Concord School District in Concord, New Hampshire, is considering partnering with the local YMCA to build a shared-use building based off the model used by LPS when it built Schoo and Moore middle schools.
Concord school officials traveled to Lincoln in 2017 to tour Moore, which was completed that same year and is attached to the Copple Family YMCA. Like Schoo, which is connected to the Fallbrook YMCA, Moore and Copple have separate outside entrances but share interior space, including a gym and classrooms.
Concord noted LPS's use of a sophisticated magnetic locking mechanism to separate shared doors between the two buildings.
The safety aspect of having a YMCA connected to a school has drawn some pushback from parents in the Concord community, according to Concord Monitor reporter Eileen O'Grady.
"It's a completely new concept in our region — I don't know of any school/YMCA partnerships in New England — so I think it's difficult for community members to envision what that could be like," O'Grady said in an email.
The plans are still in the early stages. The district has entered into a letter of intent to buy a plot of land owned by a local church, which is big enough to house a school and a YMCA.Â
Officials should know soon if the sale goes through, O'Grady said. If it doesn't, the district may have to rebuild the school on the current site, which could accommodate a smaller YMCA.
Whatever the Concord district decides, it's clear the model has been successful in Lincoln since Schoo opened in 2009.
The attached YMCA centers — which are both about roughly 50,000 square feet — provide key after-school programming for students while serving the community at-large.
Picking up the pace
Are we back to the pre-pandemic days of uneventful — and quick — school board meetings in Lincoln?
The past two regular meetings of the Lincoln Board of Education have each wrapped up in less than an hour, resembling more closely the pace of meetings before COVID-19 and questions about curriculum turned sleepy board rooms into political battlefields.
So far in 2022, the Lincoln school board has met 17 times, averaging 1 hour, 14 minutes in open session per meeting. That's down from 1 hour, 30 minutes in 2021 and a nearly two-hour average in 2020.
The longest meeting this year was April 12, lasting just over two hours. In 2021, the longest meeting was almost four hours. And in 2020, one marathon session went a whopping 5 hours, 34 minutes.
It got over just before midnight.
Most times, a meeting's length depends on the number of speakers who sign up to address the board.
Over the past two years, topics like masks, the state's proposed health education standards and critical race theory have enlivened critics who packed LPS' board room.
But lately there have been just a handful of speakers, with one exception being the Aug. 23 meeting when a controversy over a staff workshop on LGBTQ issues was in the news.
Last Tuesday's meeting was over in 27 minutes. There was only one action item on the agenda and just six people spoke during public comment.
I'm not sure what the record is, but one meeting in January 2020 — two months before the pandemic shuttered schools — lasted a mere 13 minutes.
Props to Lincoln Southwest and Lincoln Southeast, which were both recently named unified champion schools by Special Olympics Nebraska.
The national recognition honors schools for their efforts to offer unified sports and activities, which pair students with and without disabilities. The honor is bestowed upon schools that meet national standards "for excellence in inclusion, advocacy and respect," according to LPS.
There are 15 unified champion schools in Nebraska, but Southeast and Southwest are the first from Lincoln. There are more than 8,000 champion schools across the country, with a goal to grow that number by 10,000 by the end of the 2023-2024 school year.
“Two LPS schools receiving the Unified Champion School Banner designation proves each school is committed to recognizing the diversity of our population and to keeping inclusion at the forefront for our students,†Southeast education coordinator Sara Jones-Salak said in a news release.
Johnson County Central middle school students are getting a new fitness center thanks to a national health and wellness campaign.
The school in Tecumseh was one of three selected to receive upgrades to their fitness centers as part of the National Foundation for Governors' Fitness Council's 2022 Don't Quit campaign.
Millard North High School in Omaha and Gothenburg Elementary School in Dawson County are the other winners.
Each $100,000 fitness center is financed through a public-private partnership and does not rely on taxpayer funding.Â
Gov. Pete Ricketts will officially open Johnson County Central's center in a ribbon-cutting ceremony Friday.