AI-generated transcript of MHS Building Project - CTE Spaces

[Jenny Graham]: The next question that we hear a lot about is about our CTE spaces and the size of some of our CTE spaces and I will admit that this one surprised me like I nearly fell out of my chair when you gave us the initial information because what I have heard from you know countless people across Medford whether they work in the schools or they are in the community is that We love our CTE programs here and we have sort of long believed that the spaces that we have are very big and if we were to redo them they would get substantially smaller. And it sounds like that's in fact not the case at all according to your space summary. So tell us about CTE spaces.

[Matt Rice]: Sure, and I think the current state of the CTE programs here at Medford High School is really amazing. It comes from a long tradition of the vocational program and having really great enrollment, great instructors here, and great performance by students as well in terms of just allowing a lot of the programs that are here to flourish. And when the programs flourish, what it means is that there's more students enrolled in each of the programs, There's 15 current CT programs here, and we're going to be adding four more as part of the new project. The space for the program actually needs to increase, sometimes considerably. Let's take the Culinary Arts Bistro, for instance, and the Culinary Arts Program. So the bistro itself is a wonderful space. It was renovated more recently using staff and student labor in terms of putting things together. So there's been some recent investment in there, and there's also an emotional connection to that space in terms of how it turned out. And the bistro itself as a restaurant space is really wonderfully sized and adequately sized to accommodate the number of patrons that will be attending there. But when you look at the kitchen, the culinary kitchen, which is where the students are producing all of the meals that are served out in the bistro, that space is undersized by almost 50 percent as compared to what it should be. So when students are in there today and staff are in there, they're really working back to back in many cases in a scenario where we really want to be improving the safety for students, not just in the culinary program, but across the school in terms of making sure that there's enough floor area for the equipment and for the students to operate the equipment safely. So that's really what we're gonna need to do as we look at all of the Chapter 74 programs that are located within the building, is meeting the DESE requirements. So DESE is the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, and they provide criteria and guidelines for how big a Chapter 74 program needs to be in terms of square footage per student. And when you have a well enrolled program, set of programs, we end up needing to increase the size of the programs generally.

[Jenny Graham]: Great. Thank you. I was so surprised to hear that because that's long been sort of maybe a myth or a widely held belief here in Medford that these spaces are quite big. And so when I think of some of the more well-known spaces like culinary, like the salon, like the auto shop, the electrical program, like all of those spaces, have tremendous enrollment and interest by students, so figuring out how we size them is critically important. So it's good, it's I think good and helpful for people to know that this is not Jenny and Matt deciding how big the culinary space should be, but that there's actual guidelines that are state standards that all culinary programs that are being built across the state have to adhere to based on their student enrollment.