Columbia Public Schools has launched a dashboard that community members can use to look at facilities needs across the district.
This comes as the district enters the final stages of setting a 10-year facilities and infrastructure plan and the Columbia School Board plans to potentially ask voters to approve a $260 million bond issue in the spring to fund half of the plan.
The Columbia Public Schools Facilities Planning Dashboard can be found under the facility planning page on the district’s website.
People may navigate through tabs that summarize conditions of each building in the district, including their maintenance needs. The dashboard allows filtering of information based on the building’s physical condition, the types of maintenance needed and their cost.
At a Sept. 24 School Board meeting, Ian Kilpatrick of the DLR Group, which performed audits on all 43 district buildings, provided an overview of audit results. Each building was ranked on a scale of one through five and placed into one of three categories: best, average or poor.
The district’s oldest buildings — Hickman High School, Jefferson Middle School, Benton STEM Elementary School and Ridgeway Elementary School — are ranked poor, which means they warrant attention in the very near future, according to Kilpatrick’s presentation. All are at least about a century old.
Of the other 20 elementary schools in the district, eight were ranked best and 12 were average. Eagle Bluffs Elementary School, which opened in the fall, ranked the highest among all buildings in the district.
Taking Jefferson Middle into account, four of the seven middle schools are ranked best and two are ranked average. The newest middle school, John Warner, which opened in 2020, had the highest ranking among the seven middle schools.
Including Hickman, two of the five high school facilities, Battle High School and the Columbia Area Career Center, are ranked best. Douglass and Rock Bridge high schools are ranked average.
The district’s Long-Range Facilities Planning Committee has held a series of open houses this fall to draw public feedback on developing the 10-year plan. The final one will be held on Nov. 17 from 4:30 to 6:30 p.m. at the Gentry Middle School cafeteria, 4200 Bethel St.
Missourian reporters Zoe Kratzer and Nora Lamb contributed to this report.
