When it’s completed in July, the Student Activity Center (SAC) at Warsaw Community High School will be one more piece of a much broader plan for the school corporation.

“We don’t want people to get focused on ‘Well, this isn’t for me,’ ‘What do I get out of it?’” said WCS Superintendent Dr. David Hoffert. “... hopefully we can create areas and facilities where everybody feels like they’ve got something. That’s a wide-reaching goal, but we believe it is possible.”

 

27 Years Later

The high school opened in 1991, and the freshman portion of the building is older than that. It was built for 1,500 students, but now has a student count of around 2,150.

A 2012 facility study that included adding a fieldhouse onto the high school  revealed an interesting perception. “One of the comments we kept getting was, ‘The high school is brand new. It’s the new high school.’ It was an interesting perception that started coming through because the high school is almost 30 years of age,” Hoffert said.

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With a 30-year-old building, parts of the infrastructure start decaying and the learning space is not as efficient. “But we felt like it would take some time to be able to share some of that with our community because, again, people still remember the high school as really that pride point,” he said.

Items in the facility study involving the high school were prioritized to minimize impact on taxpayers.

“ ... We’re going to slowly take piece by piece off the list really over the next seven to eight years inside the high school and Career Center to update those spaces, with the commitment of keeping the tax rate where it is at and low.”

By spreading the projects out, Hoffert said they won’t have to raise taxes.

SAC More Than Athletics

Hoffert said it’s called a student activity center because the school corporation doesn’t want it to be just an athletic venue.

“We want this to have a higher academic purpose, and we also want this to be something our community calls a part of their own,” he said.

It will have an athletic component with the courts and track, but also will have classroom space and open facility space. The space could be rented out for tournaments on weekends or to different organizations needing an open venue.

“It can be a little bit for everybody...” Hoffert said. “Some of the things we’re looking at is how we can get the community in there as much as we can,” Hoffert said.

One end of the SAC will have an overhead door to make it easier for organizations to move equipment or other items in and out of the building, said Jim LeMasters, WCS director of buildings and grounds. “That’s huge, because when we looked around town, there’s no place to do that. There are facilities that are large, but you can’t get in and out easy. A trade show could come in and set up really easily and then go out the same way. And parking is right there,” he said.

He said renting the SAC could generate revenue for the corporation. “We want to be cost-neutral as much as possible,” he said.

The 65,000-square-foot SAC will include bathroom, classroom, hallway and a medical clinic.

Hoffert said WCS wouldn’t be able to do the project without community sponsors.

“Looking at health and wellness interests, not just for our students but even the broader community, K21 and 1st Source Bank were two of our firsts ones here for the last couple of months of making sizeable donations to go into this type of facility,” Hoffert said.



Employee Health Clinic

WCS has an off-site clinic for its 1,200-plus employees at MedStat. But once the SAC is completed, that clinic will have its own space in the SAC.

“We did two things really this last year between the employee health clinic and employee child care facility. We believe that these are benefits we could provide our employees that not only make it easier for them to work and retain in those positions, but also create a financial benefit both to the employee and Warsaw Community Schools,” Hoffert said.

With a majority of WCS employees working in the area near the high school, he said the clinic in the SAC makes for a central location that reduces time away from work, is easy to use and is accessible.

“It doesn’t replace their family doctor, but especially for preventative and acute symptoms, this is a great way to give back and provide a convenience,” he said.

He said it will save dollars in the long run.

The clinic goes along with the WCS insurance plan, and in the future there could be other uses for it, such as community vaccination clinics, Hoffert said.



Classroom Space

Hoffert said the SAC will contain three classrooms — two overlooking the facility that could be used by small groups and a larger, “double size” classroom across the hall that can be broken into smaller spaces.

“So we see a lot of different uses that go into it,” Hoffert said.

The space is very much needed and are areas the school will grow into it, he said.



Athletic Space

The SAC will have a 200-meter indoor track, which Hoffert says they hope to open to the public.

“We also hope to be able to do indoor training, indoor track meetings with that,” he said.

The facilities will have four universal court areas.

“It will be everything from volleyball nets coming out of the ceiling to tennis courts, tennis nets being able to come out, to pickleball, to basketball hoops. Batting cages. Drop-down nets,” Hoffert said.

LeMasters said there may be some opportunity for football activities. “Any and every sport can go in there. Also, for the band to march in there. Anything that happens on the outside, now we’re going to be totally big enough inside that you can take that inside and do that,” he said.

He said runners can use the track while tennis practice can go on inside of the track. “It’ll be multiple things going on at once,” he said.



Other Projects And Tax Dollars

Hoffert emphasized that the SAC is one phase of everything the school corporation is looking at.

“The reality is a lot of the construction projects that we’re doing inside of our traditional funds and budgeting really goes for a lot of things you don’t see: roofs, chillers, piping, internet, all of those normal utilities,” he said.

Hoffert said the school district is looking at another phase inside this project: enlarging the high school cafeteria. However, the bids came back outside the WCS budget,” so we had to put that hold,” Hoffert said.

He said they hope to look at it again next summer.

As the projects get completed piece by piece, Hoffert said they’re being conscientious by not increasing the tax rate and not creating a tax burden.

“We’re timing things when dollars fall off other projects,” he said. “When we look at the funding and what we can do with the tax dollars we are given, that if we can put them in those spots that keeps the tax rate from going up, that keeps our promise that Warsaw is one of the lowest tax districts from a school in the state of Indiana.”

He said they’re proud of WCS’s fiscal conservatism, “but we also want to make sure we’re providing the best educational environments of learning experiences for our students.”