Class size restrictions fuel portable classroom boom

BY ANGELINE TAYLOR
Published: Oct 15, 2005

BROOKSVILLE – Hernando County’s STAR Education center was in need of new classrooms worth almost 2,000 square feet of space Friday morning. By 5 p.m., those classrooms were safely secured on the school’s Varsity Drive campus.

A construction job that would normally take months to complete was reduced to mere hours on Friday. How?

Royal Concrete Concepts, Inc., a West Palm Beach company, specializes in relocated concrete classrooms otherwise known as their trademark concretables. These type of classrooms can withstand hurricane winds of up to 186 mph.

“Our company has grown dramatically over the past three years,” said John Albert, concretables director of sales and marketing.

Thirteen different school districts throughout the state have already contacted the company or utilized their buildings. Company representatives have also been contacted to build schools and residential homes in the Gulf Coast area that has been ravaged by Hurricane Katrina.

“We can take a box and configure it in a bunch of different ways,” Albert said. “It’s kind of funny our company owner always says think outside the box.” Ironically, so has school board member Sandra Nicholson. For months, Nicholson has talked in workshops and board meetings about thinking outside the box to meet the school district’s class size requirements.

The preconfigured “boxes,” that later became classrooms, are equipped with bathrooms and wall-length dry erase boards for teachers’ notes. According to Nicholson, when the door is closed to one unit, noise cannot be heard outside as workers began to set up the second unit.

“It’s beautiful inside. It’s quiet inside. I’m looking forward to going in this direction instead of buying portables,” Nicholson said. “We can service more students and we need to service more students.”

Servicing more students has been a major point of concern for several school districts throughout Florida. The Class Size Amendment has required that each school district get closer and closer to minimizing class sizes to 18 students for kindergarten through third grades; 22 students for fourth through eighth grades and 25 students for ninth through 12th grades.

The concretables company has been called in by the other school districts and Hernando County largely because of the class size restrictions. More school space is needed and the company can build a full school in three to six months. In comparison, the new county school planned for Northcliffe Boulevard will be constructed in about 12 to 24 months.

“It’s a permanent structure that can be designed easily and relocated as demographics change,” Albert said.

Each unit, Albert said, cost $72,000. Units without a bathroom would cost about $66,000 Albert said. In 2003, CNN reported that the concretables company pulled in at least $25 million in revenue due in large part to overcrowded schools.