[Jenny Graham]: When we talk about the MHS Science Labs, we're talking about, lots of people know it as B-Building, and many of you know that we went through, 10 or so years ago, a renovation of B-Building. So I think one of the things that I hear from lots of people is, we should save B-Building because it was recently renovated, and it can just be left as is. So I'm gonna let Matt tell us what the data has shown us so far about the Science Labs.
[Matt Rice]: It's a completely understandable question, Jenny, because when you walk on the third floor of the B building, that's where the science labs are up on the top floor, and there's two unrenovated sections there down below in the B building as well. It looks like the nicest area of the school, and it certainly is understandable that people are asking, well, can we keep that piece, because there's been an investment made by the community very recently. The challenge when we look at those spaces is that the overall size of the spaces is smaller than what the state requires us to build new science labs to in this day and age. So the sizing of science labs is really based on National Science Foundation regulations, which dictate that for every student that you have in a science lab, you need to have 60 square feet of space. So we have to design new science labs to accommodate 24 students. So that gives us 1,440 square feet that needs to be a new science lab. Those existing science labs are only 1,200 square feet, so there's about a net difference of 200 square feet that the rooms are undersized for if we were building them today. And so because of that, because we're participating in the MSBA program that has these minimum size requirements for spaces, we couldn't leave the science lab as they are today, even though they're the most recently renovated pieces in the building. So we need to make them larger. We would have to tear down. If we were going to leave the spaces, we'd have to tear down and expand walls in one direction or two directions to get to that size. And ripping apart a science lab is a fairly invasive activity, because there's plumbing, there's sinks that need to be moved around. So it's not like something that we could be doing in a very quick or easy fashion. And then beyond just the sizing of the science labs, the entirety of the existing building here was not designed for current structural codes in terms of lateral design. And what that means is in terms of wind being able to in part loads on a building, the building is not designed for that. So to meet current code, we would actually have to install some braces that reinforce the existing structure. And to do that, we would actually have to tear down existing walls that are on structural lines to be able to provide that reinforcement. So it's all a long way of saying that there's a lot of renovation that we would have to be doing, even if we're going to be keeping the science wing as it exists today. So we just want to make sure that there's an understanding of what would go into keeping that space if we were to try and keep it.
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