School location changes to Browns Furniture facility

Today at a meeting of the Idaho Public Charter School Commission, Palouse Prairie School received approval to change its first choice location from Now and Then Antiques to Browns' Furniture at 105 Lauder St. This facility is more central in the city, is a newer building, and offers the school substantially more space at an affordable price

A group of UI students have been working on ideas for the remodel of the Browns space. Their final presentations are open to the public. They will be held Monday, December 15th
2:30 to 5:30 PM at the University of Idaho College of Art and Architecture's Shop Critique space (a small building across the walkway to the south of the Idaho Commons).

Students are looking forward to sharing their design concepts for the adaptive re-use of the former Brown's Furniture building into the new Palouse Prairie School for Expeditionary Learning charter school. Please pass the word to other community members that also might like to attend. Please RSVP to Miranda Anderson (mirandaa@uidaho.edu) for planning purposes. Thank you!

Below are my comments addressed to the commission this AM

Comments to Commission Dec 11, 2008

Thank you chairman for a chance the address a change in the Palouse Prairie School’s petition

Let me start with a roll call of Board members.
Ashley Ater-Kranov
Lahde Forbes
Kirsten LaPaglia
Daniela Monk


While being on the phone has certain disadvantages, it does provide a means for more of our board to participate in your meeting, which we appreciate.

We lost two board members, Sterk and Granja, in November but anticipate adding a new person tonight. You may recall our skills matrix from June. The members we lost had experience in K-12 education and with Idaho Standards. The new member who has applied has similar experience. This leaves us one vacancy (our max board is 7) and we are having conversations with a person with bookkeeping and budgeting experience. Our goal is to use our skills matrix in selecting new members to ensure diversity and capture more of the qualities that you have broadly described as “business people.”

I’d like to report on good news since we last met and before we get to the matter at hand.

I already reported on our 501.c.3 status, achieved with the help of board member Lahde Forbes. In August we received $100,000 from the JA and Kathryn Albertson Foundation. In November we were notified that our Federal Startup grant was funded by the State Department of Education. Year 1 is $200,000 and the total is $671,000.

We have been getting some valuable Board development and other aid from John LeCavalier the Expeditionary Learning school designer assigned to our school. Kirsten LaPaglia and I are just back from an EL regional leadership conference held in Oakland. What struck me most about that event was to sit in a room of a dozen EL principals, and to think that with EL we have a rich and experienced esource to help our school’s development. Both Pocatello and ANSER were present at the meeting and each renewed their generous offers of assistance.

Suzanne Gregg was the keynote at the conference, presenting the structures and strategies she has in place for planning and assessing professional development of ANSER’s teachers. We made tentative plans for our Principal to go to ANSER for professional development on topics such as the structures in an EL school and ANSER’s approaches to teacher professional development.

In addition, Palouse Prairie School was paired with ANSER because of our common interest in the training of new teachers. We will develop, with the help of the school designer we share, plans to provide training to our new hires.

One of the other things our school designer helped us do this fall was to plan the recruitment for our Principal. Ashley led this committee and I’m happy to report we have a highly qualified candidate. The individual is a currently a Principal in Idaho, and holds an EdM from Harvard University. I think we are fortunate to have such a strong candidate, and responding to Secretary Luna’s thoughts, at the salary we are offering, we did not attract this applicant because we pay well. The candidate has indicated interest in our position because of the exciting nature of the EL curricular model. The Board will meet tonight to decide if we want to bring this person to Moscow for in-person interviews and to meet prospective families.

I’ll pause for questions.

We have returned to you with a request to change the facilities described in the Appendix to our charter. This change will not require a change to be body of the document.

While I am not happy with the national economy, it is a blessing for us. In this case, we are able to secure a newer building, more central in the city, close to public transit, and three times as large, for a modestly higher rent. This facility was on the market at a much higher rent for many months and the owner has decided to make us this generous offer.

In your packet you will find a cover letter that summarizes the advantages of the new facility we are proposing. For consistency with our previous visit to you, I used the budget you reviewed in June and substituted Browns’ costs for Now and Then costs.

The three-year budgets are summarized in the cover letter, Browns provides a higher cash balance each year, and its nearly twice as large (164,000) by the third year. It’s worth noting that the federal grant we received was over $200,000 higher than the grant assumed in that June budget.

The fundamental issue that improves the budget picture is the reduced infrastructural costs to get into the Browns facility.

The cover letter also summarizes some challenges to the site. Pupil safety traveling to school across the state highway is one. We expect to use buses and crossing guards to mitigate this issue.

Outdoor play space is also an issue. We have had the advantage of a University of Idaho class in Interior Design designing the remodel of Browns. Among their proposals is that we convert the hard-to-access north parking lot to a green play space. It’s not a soccer field, or a baseball diamond, but it is 30x110 feet. The other way to address the challenge is noted in the letter, we have ample space for indoor play.

An issue not mentioned in the documents is that there is a gas station/ A&W restaurant and convenience store located across the street. This establishment sells packaged beer and wine.

I have previously discussed the alcohol issue with you relative to the Silos site, where the café serves beer and wine. You have approved the Silos as our second choice facility.

State law allows the school to be located within 300 feet of the establishment in question, provided the City of Moscow consents. You will recall that Moscow has a Conditional Use Permit process and this issue will be addressed by us in that process.

I expect that we will carry the day on this issue because, at that same intersection, in fact directly across the state highway, Moscow School District holds a Conditional Use Permit for the Paradise Creek Regional High School, the districts alternative school. The distance, measured by Google Earth, straight line, door to door, from the high school to the gas station is 269 feet. Moscow has permitted this with no apparent problems.

Measuring from the Browns front door to the front door of the gas station is 218 feet. Measuring the shortest building to building distance is 177 feet. I’ve not been able to understand if the law is addressing door to door or building to building distances.

Our preferred entrance is not the current front of Browns. Advice of the City planning staff and our traffic engineer is to have bus and parent drop off on the SW corner of the building on a quiet side street. When our UI student designers converted the north parking lot to green space, they fenced it and restricted the use of the current front door to a door to access the playground. Thus our preferred entrance is 288 feet to the closest point on the gas station and over 300 feet door to door to door to the gas station.

Given that Moscow has approved a high school as close or closer to this vendor of alcohol, I believe it is credible that they will be willing to approve our school’s site.

I’ll pause for questions.

As in the past, I have included in your packet a letter from Moscow planning staff, and a letter from Laurence Rose, architect. You will also find budget details and a letter of intent to lease from the owner. I have included some photos and a sketch of a possible floor plan. The UI students have made some much more creative proposals to remodel the space than the one I submitted. Thanks to committee chair Daniela Monk we will be reviewing those on Monday. Also next week we will be reviewing the results of our solicitation for public works architects to assist us with the project.

Your staff asked about the warehouse space. It is an “L” shaped room of about 5000 sqft with a concrete floor. You could run a small fork lift in there. It has racks to allow storing of furniture on 3 levels. Right now I see this as a boon, a place to store furniture and materials we have begun to collect before we finish the remodel. In the long run we may find other uses for the space. It is not heated or cooled, and not counted in our square foot analysis.

I think that is all I want to say now, do you have any questions?