Gahanna-Jefferson Public Schools studying high school, stadium site-plan options

Three site plan options are being scrutinized for the new $158 million Gahanna Lincoln High School, with a decision expected to be made in February.

District officials, the DLR Group and Ruscilli Construction have been meeting with neighbors near the high school, with the latest meeting and options presented Jan. 12.

After further deliberation with the larger community and the master facilities planning committee, Judy Hengstebeck, the district's communications coordinator, said Superintendent Steve Barrett plans to recommend a site plan to the school board in February.

More: Gahanna-Jefferson to focus on building additions, relationships, staffing in 2022

She said Option 1, also referred to as Option A, was an original design presented to the community.

She said Option 2 (B) is similar to a previously presented plan, but in this design, the building has been flipped so the entrance is facing the neighborhood rather than the back of the building. Option 3 (C) is a new design.

Priorities the neighbors wanted in design options included keeping the current stadium, keeping the one-room schoolhouse, maximizing the sound/noise buffer, a 3-story building, maximizing green space, retaining the veterans memorial, keeping the current auditorium, a natural landscape buffer, a traffic signal and moving the stadium to another location.

>> View the three options <<

Paul Lawton, architect with DLR Group, said an effort was made to come up with designs in consideration of the neighbors’ goals.

“A traffic light is beyond our design power,” he said. “I think moving the stadium totally off site, at the time, I think the context was kind of in the Blacklick area. That’s going to be pretty difficult, but we did get to that in Option C. A third one that was a little out of our power right now was keeping the auditorium. The other seven, however, we did the best we could to accommodate.”

Retaining the stadium at its current location is Option B (2), Lawton said.

“We have retained the position of the current stadium,” he said. “What we did was we took the floor plan of the building and mirrored it east to west and then moved it to the east side of that stadium so the relationship between the stadium and the building would remain the same. There are some synergies there we tried to keep, and we think it works from that standpoint. The one-room schoolhouse, we did address that. In this particular one, we relocated it to the west of the stadium. As you drive down Hamilton, you would see it on the back side of those bleachers.”

Lawton said the building would help serve as a sound and noise buffer in this plan.

As designers, he said, they try to minimize the footprint of the overall high school, so the building is 3 stories.

“The southern and northern portions are the gymnasiums and auditoriums, so those naturally will be 2 stories, but the main core of the building where the academic wings are – that’s a 3-story space,” Lawton said. “No. 5 (priority) is to maximize green space. As you know from the parameters we shared, we have some parking counts we have to hit, according to city code occupancy/assembly rates of auditorium/gym, etc. We tried, obviously; it’s our intent to. We love greenery just as much as you do, so we did our best to maximize that.”

He said all three options retain the veterans memorial.

That natural landscape area is being increased along that eastern border in Option B.

“We think we did the best we could with the square footage of the building, the parking counts we had in keeping stadium where they’re at," he said. "The bus circulation is similar to the first scheme. We tried to split up that circulation so buses will be coming from the south, your student parking will be coming from the west up to the north, and you have your staff parking and parent drop-off to the east.”

The new option, Option C, is an attempt to move the stadium to another site.

“This was our attempt to really make the best of both worlds,” Lawton said. “If we had a blank slate, this might be close to what we would’ve come up with. We really did our best to accomplish as many of those goals as possible: increasing your border, separating the parking and vehicular traffic. This one relocates the stadium to the southwest. All three of these have pros and cons. It’s our intent to give options and to give some consideration for the district to present going forward.”

Frank Pinciotti, Ruscilli Construction project executive, said Option A would be to build the new stadium first.

“That way the current use of the stadium would only be impacted by one year,” he said. “So the teams would find other places to play. We have to be building the new building at the same time we’re building the new stadium.”

He said Options A and B would affect use of the stadium for about a year, whereas the high school would be without a stadium for four-plus years under Option C, and it would cost about $3.5 million more.

Terry Rippl, a 44-year resident, said he thought the district did a good job of answering the questions with the information available. He said he knew a school was near his home when he moved to the neighborhood.

“When there’s a football game and there’s a touchdown, we hear a roar,” Rippl said. “That’s not that big of a problem.”

He said he’s pleased with the maximizing of green space.

Judy Brown, a Southwind Drive resident, said she was surprised the district offered two other options.

“My preference is the one that doesn’t move the stadium, B. It seems they took requests in account,” she said.

The day after the meeting, resident Ginny Evans said she has spent quite a bit of time thinking about the three proposals.

“I was pleased to see that the district listened to the neighbor concerns and presented two additional options to the footprint design,” she said. “Personally, with the information I currently have, I would eliminate Option A because no one should be so directly negatively impacted by having a stadium so close to their property as the Saverne Place neighbors would be.”

Initially, Evans said, she thought Option B looked good.

“But after closer inspection and discussion, I realized that the separation of the student parking area from the school building is not a good option,” she said. “Students would need to walk around the stadium to get in the school building, and the student parking area is not visible from the building. I don’t think this is a good thing related to overall school safety and logistics.”

Evans said Option C seems to be the best option for the long term.

“It is too bad that there would be no football stadium for four years, but when I focus on the overall lifespan of the new building/campus and the academic and safety concerns in general, I believe they take precedence over the short-term athletic program interruptions. Option C is also more expensive due to the amount of time the entire project will take to be completed. However, while I don’t want to see the district spend money on unnecessary things (like moving the one-room schoolhouse to High Street), I think it would be wise to spend extra money to do what will give us the most benefit over the life of the new building.”

Pinciotti said not a lot of detail is in the schematic design phase.

“The next phase is called design development, when they get into the details – the walls, the partitions, the finishes – and gets more detailed but not to the extent that we could actually put it on the street and bid," Pinciotti said. "We do another check on what the cost of the design development drawings would be. That gets evaluated. When that’s approved, maybe there’s an exercise to reduce cost to pull some things out or specify some things that are less expensive.”

Pinciotti said the next stage would be construction documents.

“Those, when they’re done, we can go on the street and actually bid it with some contractors and determine actual costs," he said. "There’s those checks and balances along the way to make sure we aren’t designing the Taj Mahal when we can’t afford it.”

Assistant Superintendent Jill Elliott said Gahanna Lincoln High School has approximately 2,400 students, and a replacement Lincoln High School on the current site would accommodate an anticipated 2,800 students.

Elliott said the high school staff have provided input in a variety of ways throughout the design process and will be engaged more in the coming months as the floor plan is finalized and discussion move to the interior spaces.

She said the goal is to open the new high school for the 2024-25 school year.

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This article originally appeared on ThisWeek: Gahanna-Jefferson Public Schools studying high school, stadium site-plan options