Changes planned to Mt. Vernon Community School Corporation’s campus in Fortville include a new school, redefining an existing one, a new transportation center, a new road and other changes.
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FORTVILLE – Hancock County’s now largest school district, whose growth shows no signs of stopping anytime soon, is a step closer to carrying out extensive improvements to its main campus for handling that expansion.
Estimated at $84 million, Mt. Vernon Community School Corporation’s plans call for a new school, redefining an existing one, a new transportation center, a new road and other changes on its property at Ind. 234 and CR 200W. The intentions include land north and east of the existing campus that the school corporation bought and had annexed into Fortville last year.
Fortville Advisory Plan Commission members unanimously approved the concept plans for the endeavor late last month.
The effort stems from Mt. Vernon’s future growth plan developed during the 2019-20 school year with hundreds of community members over the course of several months.
Part of the strategy involves turning Fortville Elementary School, located west of CR 200W, back into an intermediate school and building a new elementary school east of CR 200W.
After the new elementary school is built, fifth-grade classrooms will move out of the district’s elementary schools and into the intermediate school, creating more room for kindergarten through fourth grade. Sixth-grade classrooms will move from the middle school to the intermediate school as well, leaving the middle school with more room for seventh- and eighth-graders.
Mt. Vernon currently has about 4,500 students and is projected to hit 6,000 by the end of the decade. The district’s student population surpassed Greenfield-Central, formerly the county’s biggest school district, for the first time in the 2021-22 school year.
Jack Parker, Mt. Vernon superintendent, said at the recent plan commission meeting that the district gained nearly 100 students this year.
“It’s a little bit lower than our typical growth,” he added. “But we’ve already delayed the building by a year because we’re committed to not doing any construction until we see the whites of their eyes. We’re very future-focused.”
Also part of Mt. Vernon’s plan is a new private drive looping around the eastern part of the Fortville campus to increase vehicle-queuing capacity at the middle school and future elementary school.
“We are highly motivated to make traffic run smoothly,” Parker said. “One of the big purposes of this … is site circulation to increase the queues an incredible amount.”
It will also improve safety by getting vehicles off roads, he continued, adding it should help students get into classrooms on time as well.
“It’s partially about functionality in school,” he said.
Additionally, the new drive will allow for school buses to have their own queues separate from ones for parents dropping off their children.
The new transportation center will be in the northeast corner of the property. It will be near part of the Mount Vernon Pointe neighborhood, but buffered by a yard, landscaping and drainage pond. Greg Wade of Indianapolis-based Context Design, which Mt. Vernon hired to help with its plans, said the new transportation center’s design will allow for the avoidance of loud beeps that accompany reversing buses.
“The stall sizes and the dimensions of those bus parking stalls allow the drivers to turn their wheels when they park, and to pull right on through as they proceed forward,” he said. “So there will be zero backing up for those drivers.”
Mt. Vernon’s plans also call for eventually demolishing its current transportation center and staff health center south of its administration building and replacing it with parking. Parker said that, along with a new soccer field to the east of the administration building likely won’t come to fruition until a later phase.
“We need to get our transportation center moved back and all of our buses behind a fence to keep them secure,” Parker said. “…We want to get started on phase one, which is going to take us a good couple of years to get that rolling.”
Parker told the Daily Reporter in an email that the planned road will be needed before any new building on campus can commence, adding the transportation building will be the first to be built after the road.
“The transportation center and the road around our campus have been needed for some time now; we do not have a location that can house all of our buses and the current transportation building is distressingly inadequate,” Parker said. “…We are watching our enrollment growth very closely to ensure the timing of the new elementary build coincides with the need and therefore, justifies the construction to begin.”
New fields for discus and shot put are planned between the middle school’s football field and baseball and softball diamonds as well.
Mt. Vernon’s future growth plan also includes increasing capacity at its high school, located at the northwest corner of Ind. 234 and CR 200W, and at its middle school within the next 10 years.
