Hello to everyone in the Northwest Community!
We have a lot of excellent things happening throughout the school district. We have been working diligently on our district wide strategic plans last year and this year too.
Recently, our school board approved an agenda item to enable the school district to purchase 113.5 acres for less than $8,000 an acre from a local farming family. This purchase will allow the school district to grow in a variety of ways. The school district will purchase the land with no direct local tax payer dollars within the community.
MacGregor Farm will be acquired through Nexus pipeline money that the school district has already received. This is important for everyone to remember: The land will be purchased with no local tax payer dollars through the general fund. This recent purchase will enable Northwest Local Schools to do many things for or students and we do this without leveraging any local funding.
This purchase has been done for student safety. The additional land will eventually provide us additional entrances and exits to the school district in case of an emergency. We constantly obsess over safety in all of our school buildings. We believe, with this purchase, Northwest Local Schools continues to move in the right direction.
Eventually, with the land purchase we would like to expand our stadium parking. When we have a large crowd for an event or game at the stadium, parking has become a major issue. Part of our strategic plans includes making improvements with parking for outdoor events at our stadium. Even beyond parking, we are hopeful the land purchase will allow us the opportunity to improve our existing facilities as well.
We are also examining the possibility for Northwest to go green through adding solar panels on school grounds. The implementation of the solar panels could provide over 75% of our energy throughout the district. Even better, this would allow Northwest School to be one of the first to go green in Stark County.
We will also expand our science curriculum with the addition of 13 acres of wetlands. Science teachers here could create classes where our students use the land and the wetlands as a hands-on learning experience.
This purchase is a great situation for our district. We have many excellent plans which will unfold over the next few years. This land will never ever be used as a new bus garage. This purchase will allow us to continue to be friendly neighbors for anyone in the surrounding area. Finally, please remember, the pipeline money will be used to cover the entire cost of the land acquisition.
We are blessed and lucky to have the opportunity to say thank you. We also welcome any suggestions to help us to continue to move forward.
Thank you and have a great weekend!
Thank you-
Shawn M. Braman, Ed.D