The guy in the red baseball cap has done this before.
In 1999, when Dennis Van Horn was a district administrator at Lincoln Public Schools, the district was wrestling with the question of high schools.
Lincoln had four public high schools and they were crowded and the city was growing and they needed more space. So LPS created a community group called the Citizens’ Council on High Schools and it dove into the question.
In the end, the group recommended building two high schools for about 1,500 students apiece, with the same, comprehensive facilities as the existing high schools.
Voters approved a $100 million bond issue and got North Star and Southwest high schools.
Fast forward 20 years and Van Horn, who now builds houses after 34 years with LPS, including seven as the associate superintendent of business affairs, is part of another group looking into the same question.
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The Superintendent’s Facilities Advisory Committee is a wide-ranging group of community members and LPS staff reviewing the district's expected building needs over the next decade.
The group's work will lead to recommendations that will likely be the basis for a 2020 bond issue.
Subcommittees are divided by topic: high school focus programs and other alternatives; new elementary and middle schools or schools with different grade configurations; a new high school athletics and activities complex; infrastructure and finance; and early childhood and community learning centers.
But the biggest subcommittee — delving into arguably the most pressing question — is on high schools. Van Horn, in a red baseball cap and with a historical perspective, was among those debating the possibilities at the group’s third of eight meetings last week.
He thinks maybe the community’s collective thinking has shifted, that there’s more willingness to look at different options.
“There’s a recognition that our community has changed and there’s lots of different kids with different needs and ways of learning.â€
LPS officials have said much the same thing: that the district finds itself at a unique point, where technology advances and interest in dual language, hands-on learning and career-focused education has broadened the possibilities.
But here’s the thing: Go back to the 20-year-old news stories — and pick Van Horn’s brain — and it seems clear the debate is similar in many ways.
The 1999 group ended up recommending two full-size high schools — those with swimming pools and auditoriums and full-sized competition gyms.
But there was lots of discussion of doing something different.Â
“It’s not very often that you have the opportunity to make a drastic change,†co-chair Roger Larson said then.
Co-chair Bob Evnen said building two full-size high schools could mean their counterparts in the future would feel the need to follow suit.
“If we’re going to make a change,†he said. “This is the moment.â€
There was extensive discussion about building smaller schools — Journal Star reporter JoAnne Young traveled to Canada to check out Edmonton’s school system, which had garnered international recognition for its extensive offering of small, choice programs on everything from fine arts to hockey and language immersion.Â
Former Journal Star Publisher Bill Johnston, who was the lone no vote on the final recommendation, couldn’t agree with spending roughly $8 million for swimming pools in the new schools.
Former school board member Doug Evans wanted to build a smaller school — maybe two schools on one of the sites the district owned.
One of the proposals at that time was to build two high schools without performance-level athletic facilities, a third, smaller technology-focused high school and a central athletic facility.
In the end, the group’s recommendation, in addition to the two full-sized schools, included "seriously considering the idea of the 'school-within-a-school' design" and the idea of a technical or technology program.
Back here in 2019, LPS officials — faced with growth in all parts of the city — offered two options: a full-sized high school comparable to the existing schools or two smaller schools — but still in Class A for sports — that would have all the core facilities so they could easily be expanded in the future.
Van Horn noted that when LPS built Scott and Lux middle schools, it did so with an eye to later expansion.
The landscape is different: The Career Academy has gone from an idea to a reality and there's a push nationally to fill the demand for skilled jobs that don't require a four-year college degree.
In 1999, Van Horn said, the district’s science and arts and humanities programs were still relatively new.
“We were still struggling to get people to understand what it was,†said Van Horn, who was instrumental in getting those programs started. “That’s more accepted (now) and it’s opened some people’s eyes to (the idea that) there’s other ways to learn, and I think teachers and educators have become more accepting of trying to do things in different ways.â€
The district now has stats on the focus programs, which include the Career Academy, the International Baccalaureate program at Lincoln High and the junior ROTC program at Northeast.
None are at capacity, but students who participate get more hands-on learning and lessons tailored to their individual needs and then tend to be successful.
The group plans to survey students about their interest in focus programs, as well as why some chose high schools other than those in their attendance areas.
The percentage of students who attend high schools within their attendance areas ranges from 55 percent at Lincoln High to 79 percent at Southwest.
At a meeting of the facilities committee last week, the wide-ranging discussion touched on lots of issues, some very reminiscent of two decades ago: the need for swimming pools in all high schools, what "equitable" means, that some students want to attend smaller schools, that whatever is built must be flexible enough to accommodate changes in education.
Van Horn believes one of the things that drove the final decision 20 years ago is that Lincoln believes strongly in neighborhood schools.
It's an idea that runs through the discussions about equity, he said, that schools are as much community centers as they are classrooms.
He thinks that still holds true.
“There is a ton of ownership in these high schools by the community,†he said.