Board chair pitches site of new school for new library But idea might be too late

FORT FRANCES—After years of planning to build a new Fort Frances Public Library, the Rainy River District School Board is now suggesting a new proposal be considered for the facility.
The board is proposing to have the library built in conjunction with a new Robert Moore School here.
The board received planning approval from the provincial government in December for a total capitalized value of $9.8 million to address facility conditions.
This means the board has entered into the first phase of building a new school.
As such, board chairman Dan Belluz said they are hoping to co-ordinate a meeting between Education Director Jack McMaster and Fort Frances CAO Mark McCaig if the proposal is something that might be feasible.
“The conversation came about when I saw the shortfall in the funding that they were looking at with the town for the building,” Belluz noted. “I thought this would be an ideal alternative benefiting both the school and the community.”
But after speaking to library board chair Joyce Cunningham, Belluz conceded the idea might not be feasible because the library board is expecting final drawings within the next week or two, which then will go out for tender.
“Whether or not it could be delayed, I don’t know,” he remarked, though adding if there is a possibility it could work, he hoped it will be considered.
“It would be great to get some dialogue between the school board, the library, and the town to see if some alternative can come up,” Belluz remarked.
“Thinking of the cost, it would be about sharing the facility,” he explained. “In the new Robert Moore there will be a library, so if there was a public library attached to it, students could utilize the library and the town could utilize it.
“We might look at, perhaps, taking the amount of money it would cost us to build our own library and incorporating that into the public library.”
Belluz indicated other sharing possibilities also could include one mechanical, electrical, and heating system instead of two.
“I can see a potential for great cost-savings and not just in the building, but in the future for maintenance,” he said, noting the collaboration with the town on the Townshend Theatre and with Confederation College certainly worked has well.
He believes a shared library could be just as successful.
But with the library board meeting with architects this week to go over final plans with the hopes of the job going out to tender this month, Cunningham said Friday she doesn’t think the proposed idea is feasible at this stage of the game.
“The whole concept of that is probably abut two years too late,” said Cunningham. “In fact, Jack McMaster talked to us about that last May. We indicated then that it was probably too late.
“When Dan and I talked about all of this [on Friday], he realized that we were at the stage now where we’re looking at the detailed architectural drawings and this is way, way, way too late,” she added.
“We’re pretty well ready to go to tender, or we will be very soon, and he realized as soon as you get to that stage, well—he’s been involved in building schools and he knows that these things all take time.”
Cunningham noted the library board had looked into the idea in the past and studied examples of joint public/school libraries elsewhere in Ontario.
“Where accommodations like that have worked, and we have seen some where they did work, it was almost exclusively with a high school and a public library.
“What they did to make it work was they were involved in very detailed planning, way, way, way in advance,” she recalled.
“So they weren’t simply talking about the building, they were taking about the responsibilities, the philosophy, everything about sharing, who pays for what and what the expectations are,” added Cunningham.
“When that was done, there were some that did work, but even in those cases, they had some difficulties to iron out.”
Cunningham noted the successful examples were in communities where both a teacher librarian and public librarian worked and planned everything together.
But there’s only one teacher librarian under the Rainy River District School Board, who works at Fort Frances High School.
“In the one case where it was a pilot project for a board, it was in a big area and so they could put it out to the schools,” said Cunningham. “And they had a number of teacher librarians, so it was a teacher librarian that bid on the job.
“It was somebody that was firmly committed to making this work,” she stressed. “If you simply say to somebody, ‘You’re going in here and this is what you’re going to do,’ it wasn’t so successful.”
Cunningham added there’s many other factors that would have to be sorted out between the library and public school board.
“One of the most obvious ones is who pays for the resources? In one of the places where we saw it wasn’t working very well, it was the public library paying for all the resources and all the school board contributed was a computer lab, which was available to the public when the kids weren’t there,” she noted.
“There was a lot of pressure on the public library board to supply a lot of those resources. That’s not only money, but space.”
In some cases of public/school libraries, said Cunningham, there would have to be restrictions on how many students could be in the library during the day because there wasn’t enough space to accommodate both them and the public users.
“There’s a great deal of supervision that’s involved in a good school library, and if the school was depending on the public library staff to do all of that, that’s when they were getting into some problems,” she remarked.
There also is different philosophies in the selection of resources for a public library and a school one, particularly an elementary school library, which could be problematic.
Another major consideration is the $1.6 million in funding the library project already received from the Ministry of Culture is based on the proposed site next to the Memorial Sports Centre.
“That’s why we got the money. We got the money over a year ago because we had a site and we were ready to move,” said Cunningham. “It’s a little bit more complicated than some people think.”
In related news, Cunningham and the rest of the library board were expected to meet this week with Chamberlain Architects to get a look at up-to-date detailed plans for the new library.
“We’re talking with the architect about getting the plans more in line with the true architectural drawings, but then we still have to be talking with the town representatives,” she noted.
“We’re all wrestling with this idea of how do we do all of this in an efficient manner.
“As the mayor says, we have to look for compromise and everybody’s saying ‘yes.’ Well, we have to figure out how we sit down and do that,” added Cunningham.
“But we can’t delay too long because we want to get out to tender.”
(Fort Frances Times)