By Valarie Honeycutt Spears

A draft plan puts a new $24 million building for Fayette County School’s STEAM Academy at the top of the school district’s construction priority list.

The school district’s Local Planning Committee will continue working Wednesday on the four-year plan, which currently makes a new building for the 600 students at STEAM a top priority, followed by a new $25.7 million middle school in the Richmond Road corridor for 900 students, a new $15.4 million elementary school on Athens-Boonesboro Road, and a new $15.4 million elementary school in the Hamburg area. The elementary schools would serve 650 students each.

No location has been selected for the STEAM building. Until it comes to fruition, school officials hope that a mural on the existing building’s exterior and banners will brighten the former Johnson Elementary School on East Sixth Street, where the STEAM program has been housed since 2013. STEAM is a technology-driven school and the 1939 building is viewed as inadequate.

The mural, which features elements of science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics, which is what STEAM stands for, was completed earlier this month as part of a Lexington street art festival called PRHBTN. Parents at a recent forum had complained about the building’s aging exterior.

“We are trying to do as much as possible without investing wholly in that facility,” said Myron Thompson, the district’s senior director of operations and support.

He added: “We have to make it liveable. We have to make it work, but the goal is to get them the space they need for a 21st century learning environment.”

Once STEAM finds a new home, the Johnson building could be used for a proposed 250-student newcomer’s academy for immigrants or a proposed dropout prevention program for 250 students, Thompson said. While STEAM remains at Johnson, there will be some wireless Internet and HVAC improvements, along with landscaping and other beautification efforts, Thompson said.

The district’s facilities plan, which was last updated in 2013, is still being tweaked and must be approved by the Fayette County Public Schools Board and the Kentucky Board of Education.

Having a project on the plan doesn’t mean construction is a given, but a project can’t move forward if it’s not on the plan.

University of Kentucky and Fayette County schools officials announced in January 2015 that the STEAM program would be moving from the Johnson building to a newly constructed facility on UK’s campus, with UK providing the site and the district responsible for construction. By December 2015, however, district officials said the site didn’t meet state environmental safety standards.

Each year, PRHBTN features the installation of large scale public murals around Lexington. On Oct. 15, students worked with artists on the mural, which includes a laboratory beaker, a microscope, and planets, among other depictions.

STEAM students “were extremely excited,” said school director Tina Stevenson.

The mural was needed, Stevenson said, because the “outside of STEAM Academy doesn’t tell the story of all the rich activities and opportunities for our students on the inside.”

“Our goal is to have STEAM Academy as attractive on the outside as it is on the inside,” said Stevenson. “This building has served us well. But there’s no telling what we could do if we had some space.”

Meanwhile, the Local Planning Committee is expected to meet for several more weeks to refine the district’s facilities plan.

Also high on the draft plan of priorities are more secure entrance vestibules at 22 district facilities, which will cost $50,000 each, and girls softball fieldhouses and locker rooms at five Fayette high schools, costing a total of $1.5 million. The sports additions will address a problem the Kentucky High School Athletic Association found with federal Title IX laws that require equal opportunities for boy and girl athletes.

In that same group of priorities is a $15 million expansion of the School for Creative and Performing Arts, or SCAPA, which would double the school’s capacity. A $15 million theater with seating for 1,000 on an undetermined site is also a priority.