BUTLER TWP — Questions about the future of the Butler School District will begin to be answered Wednesday night with the update of a facilities study at a school board meeting.

As administrators have said previously, a variety of options to make the district more efficient will be presented upon completion of the study.

Those options likely will include school closings and/or redistricting proposals for school board members to consider.

“It’s going to be an update on the process, the procedures, the steps that they’ve taken, and I believe it’ll lead to a more specific meeting or presentation with their findings and recommendations,” said Dale Lumley, superintendent, about the consultants who are doing the study.

Thomas and Williamson Project Management of Pittsburgh in August 2013 was hired to do the 17-month study, costing the district $144,590. Jon Thomas, president of the group, will lead Wednesday’s presentation.

“What I wanted to do was give them a little primer to show the methods that we’re using to develop the concepts that we’re going to present,” Thomas said.

“We’re going to refresh their memory with their historic enrollment, how changes have happened there, their historic budgets to show the relationship between the amounts of the students and amounts of the budgets, what their capacities have been in their schools, how full their schools are.

“That will kind of be the canvas we use to introduce them to the categories of options. We’re going to tell them what the categories of options are that we’ll be presenting.”

More details, Thomas said, will be released over the next several months.

Representatives from Thomas and Williamson met privately with administrators and school board members at least twice in November and December, but those meetings were deemed inadvertent violations of the state Sunshine Law because they were not advertised to the public.

Since then, some school board members have felt a study update was necessary. Members Karen Callihan, Neil Convery, Jim Keffalas and Bill Halle all called for the special meeting to be held.

“We’re just trying to get some things on the record,” Halle said. “We just want it to be a public process.”

The district has 11 elementary schools serving kindergarten through sixth grades, a junior high school serving seventh and eighth graders, an intermediate high school serving ninth and 10th graders, and a senior high school serving juniors and seniors.

Because of the Sunshine Law violations, documents distributed during the closed meetings were released as Right To Know documents, which included more than 100 pages of baseline data and maps.

According to those documents, several of the elementary schools hovered at a 60 percent to 70 percent utilization rate. Those rates factor in the building’s capacity compared to the number of students and student to teacher ratio.

The schools with the lowest usage percentages as of December were Center Avenue at 60 percent, Summit Township at 63 percent, and Clearfield at 67 percent use rates.

Meridian Elementary had the highest operating efficiency percentage among the elementary schools at 87 percent.

Board members had previously discussed closing Center Avenue following the 2012-13 school year since that move could have potentially saved the district up to $500,000 per year, but the school has remained open.

The Thomas and Williamson documents also look at class usage.

For example, in the Butler Intermediate High School language department, Japanese I and II classes had an average of 22.2 percent use because 157 slots are available for each language with only 35 students taking Japanese.

Latin classes had a 113 percent use rate, with 179 students taking Latin I and II classes.

Overall efficiency at the intermediate high school languages department, including French, Spanish, German, Japanese, and Latin, was about 62 percent.

School board members in recent years had suggested cutting Japanese classes. However, public outcry of those potential cuts convinced enough board members to keep those classes.

Thomas noted that studying a school district in so much depth is never easy.

“I’ve done a number of consolidation plans before, and it’s always really tough for the people to accept it,” Thomas said.

“They want to shoot the messenger ... But in reality I’m looking at the information that the district is supplying so I can help them make some good decisions with their facilities in the future.”