Proposed options for managing growth in the Granville school district will be revealed during a public planning meeting at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, April 15, in the Granville High School Commons.

The district’s Strategic Planning Task Force used the priorities expressed by district residents during a February public meeting and online to develop the options, said Superintendent Jeff Brown.

| Read more: Special meeting gives Granville-area residents opportunity to help set priorities for schools facing significant growth

“We have four options that we will be sharing and communicating with community residents,” Brown said on Monday.

Long-term strategic planning for the district has taken on more urgency since the Granville Exempted Village School District learned specific details in December about a proposed 600-home subdivision in Heath that could bring an additional 960 students to the 2,600-student district.

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The current elementary and intermediate schools are at 95% capacity for enrollment.

Those who attend the April 15 meeting will have the opportunity to talk about the pros and cons of each option, he said.

Each option will be presented with rough estimates of cost, although at this point, any construction is at least five years away, and it’s challenging to estimate cost day-to-day in this era.

“We will give that feedback to the task force so that the task force can make a recommendation to the school board” in May, Brown said. “The four options align with what we’ve been hearing from people.”

| Read more: Big crowd hears details of proposed 600-home subdivision and how Granville schools are preparing to manage growth

The key priorities expressed by the public are cost efficiency and academic excellence, which is “keeping what has traditionally been why people move to Granville at the center of our attention.”

Brown said the details will be addressed on Tuesday, and they are rooted, in part, in a consistent theme in the feedback, which was “a lot of recognition of [traffic] congestion. Our main thoroughfare goes through a relatively old village. There’s a lot of recognition for that.”

Video recordings and details from the previous two planning meetings are available on the district website

Alan Miller writes for TheReportingProject.org, the nonprofit news organization of Denison University’s Journalism program, which is supported by generous donations from readers. Sign up for The Reporting Project newsletter here.

Alan Miller

Alan Miller teaches journalism and writes for TheReportingProject.org, the nonprofit news organization of Denison University's Journalism Program. He is the former executive editor of The Columbus Dispatch and former Regional Editor for Gannett's 21-newsroom USAToday Network Ohio.