There weren't many immediate updates on the two public high school projects available at Friday's second monthly community coffee outreach by the Jefferson City School District, but more detailed updates are coming soon.
"We'll have more drawings after the August board meeting, with a lot more detail about what's going inside the buildings," Jason Hoffman, the district's chief financial and operating officer, said about plans for the renovated high school at 609 Union St. and the new one at Mission Drive off Missouri 179.
Hoffman led the meeting instead of Superintendent Larry Linthacum, who was not present. About 30 people attended, including a few Jefferson City Public Schools staff and board members.
The August Board of Education meeting will be at 6 p.m. Aug. 14 at the board office.
Hoffman said plans presented publicly then will have a little more room-by-room detail.
"We're down to what's in the building on each level," he said.
That doesn't mean plans will detail where a specific math classroom will be, for example, but people will be able to see more of how the overall square footage has been divvied up in terms of type of space or classroom. Science classrooms will stand out some in the plans because of the lab space they require.
A group of 30 departmental representatives have been talking with architects about their needs and what they would like to see in the new and redesigned buildings. Hoffman said architects from the DLR Group and ACI Boland will meet next week with each department to get a more focused list of their needs.
Hoffman said it's best to think of what the public will see in August as coming down from a 30,000-foot to 20,000-foot view.
The same could be said of progress on the boundary line analysis work underway by Business Information Services LLC.
"He's taken our district and what he's done is cut it up into tiny little sectors," Hoffman said about BIS owner Preston Smith's work. There are thousands of those tiny pieces of the larger boundary lines map, "so what we can do is say, 'Here are our boundaries today.' (Then) he can give us different scenarios: 'You could do this, you could do this, you could do this.' We could then see which of those we like" and tweak as necessary.
Hoffman expects committee work to re-examine boundary lines, based on the outcome of the analysis, to begin this fall.
As for clearing the site for the new high school, Architects Alliance's principal architect Cary Gampher said mass clearing won't happen until late fall. However, "selective clearing" will happen to let geotechnical investigators make a grid on the site in the footprint of the building's foundation to drill test holes for examining the geology of the site's underground.
Hoffman said that clearing probably will happen next month - on track with the publicly available draft schedule of the two projects.
There's no timeline available yet on picking the name and mascot of the second high school. Hoffman's "personal preference" is the Capitol High Grizzlies - given the bears on the state flag - but his favorite of the received suggestions is not any indication of anything final.
The next community coffee is scheduled for 7-8 a.m. Aug. 4.