The Parent-Teacher Resource Center located in the Washington Education Center won’t move to the Front Door community center as previously considered by the Great Bend USD 428 school board. At Monday’s meeting, assistant superintendents John Popp and JoAnn Blevins explained why that option isn’t recommended.

PTRC is a maker space where anyone can come to make projects such as bulletin board presentations. There are hundreds of die cuts for making shapes and letters of the alphabet. There is a laminator and colored paper and space to work on projects.

The PTRC will need a new location if the district ever demolishes the 100-year-old building that was Washington Elementary School. It is housed next to the school in a later addition but the addition can’t be saved without adding restrooms. At present, people have access to restrooms in the old portion of the building.

The City has offered to lease space at the Front Door that was previously occupied by a daycare center. So, Blevins took the PTRC staff to the facility to check it out.

“They came prepared,” she said. “They had done a nice job of measuring all of the different shelving that holds all the die cuts and all of those materials so we could pull out a tape measure and kind of see how things would fit. The long and the short of it is, it’s a nice space. It’s just not big enough when you put all of the die cuts and the laminator and all of the paper racks and all of the things that are in there.”

She said the shelving at the PTRC would completely cover all of the windows at the Front Door facility, obscuring the natural light it offers.

“There wouldn’t be enough space for patrons to actually complete projects,” she added.

Popp said they talked about getting rid of some of the things the PTRC has. If it became necessary to move there, the district could make it work.

However, “From the people who work in the PTRC, they’re not seeing that it would be a very good fit for what it does,” he said. “They can stay right where they are for the time being. We’re not in a hurry to tear anything down. We’ll keep looking. We do have some other potential options.”

Those include finding space the district already has or could purchase. Another option is to lease space. The church that USD 428 rented for Little Panthers Preschool before it moved to its current location might be willing to lease some of that space to the district again.

Washington demolition

During the meeting, the board also saw a list of potential capital outlay projects for this year. One item is demolishing the 1900 portion of the Washington building at a cost of $750,000. Popp said the cost would be closer to $400,000 if nothing is done to preserve the PTRC.