FMPC favors keeping play-area standards
The Goddard School’s expansion plans hit a roadblock at the Farragut Municipal Planning Commission’s Thursday, Sept. 17, meeting as commissioners opposed a requested change to the Town’s outdoor play-area requirements.
A representative of The Goddard School from Studio Four Design, a Michael Graves Company, requested the Town consider a text amendment reducing its fenced outdoor play-area requirement for day care facilities from 100 square feet per child to the state requirement of 50 square feet per child.
Because FMPC heard the matter as a workshop item, it took no formal action, but Commissioners expressed a consensus that the Town’s current standards should remain in place.
“The Goddard School off Loudon Road is planning to expand with a roughly 2,800-square-foot addition” to its existing 8,200-square-foot building, Community Development Director Mark Shipley said. “The site plan for this project was conditionally approved at the July 16 Planning Commission meeting.
“One of the approval conditions was that a fenced outdoor play area, per the Town's Zoning Ordinance, is provided to meet the requirement that at least 100 square feet is provided per child … or a text amendment is approved by the Board of Mayor and Aldermen to follow the State of Tennessee requirement [50 feet], as applied to the square footage needed for fenced outdoor play areas.”
Shipley noted the ordinance has been in place for more than 20 years.
At the July meeting, he said, under the requirement of 100 square feet of usable play space per child, it appeared the facility could accommodate up to 158 children, which would require a fenced outdoor play area of at least 15,800 square feet.
“They don’t meet the requirement,” he added. “They don’t have the space.”
The school therefore requested that the Town lower the requirement, “which would be more in line with the state’s requirement,” Shipley said.
But Knoxville resident Melissa Schell, who has a grandchild attending The Goddard School, urged Commissioners to keep the Town’s standards.
“I think we’re losing sight that Goddard is a daycare, a preschool,” she said. “It is all about kids, and you want to lower your standards to meet a Nashville company.
“I beg you … we’re Farragut,” Schell said. “Keep our standards high. Let us be who we are.”
“Goddard School is trying to rectify an issue that we currently have in Farragut with daycare,” said Brian Nicholson, managing principal with Michael Graves Company. “We have an extensively long waiting list to get into daycares.
“The community is underserved with this,” he said. “They’re trying to provide that service for our community.”
While Commissioners were more open to the text amendment in July, their opinions shifted by Thursday’s meeting.
“When we discussed this a couple months ago, I think I supported the idea to match the state standards because I thought it would make it easier for staff,” Commissioner Noah Myers said. “And, the more that I thought about it, the Town of Farragut, we never set our standards based on the lowest common denominator.
“We’ve always had a higher standard,” he added. “It also concerns me about the other facilities in the Town of Farragut … for many, many years have been following our standards; and now because you want to grow — and I respect you trying to work on your waiting list — you’re asking us to lower our standards.
“Quite frankly, I’m not comfortable lowering our standards,” Myers said.
Mayor Alex Cain, who also serves on the Planning Commission, agreed that other day care and preschool facilities in Town “have been able to work through the standards we’ve set a long time ago.
“I don’t think we need to change our standards when it’s worked so well for so long,” he said.
“I recently had kids in day care, five or six years ago, and when we were looking into the daycare system, we wanted the best,” new Commissioner John Tague said. “… that’s what makes this Town so great, the standards that we hold, and I don’t think we should be adjusting those standards.”
“We’re changing a rule for the entire town, not just for Goddard School,” new Commissioner Michael Wilson said. “And if somebody else who runs a daycare facility, now or in the future, are they going to say, ‘we can put X number of children because that’s 50 square feet,’ which again changes our standard within Town,” and isn’t in alignment with the National Association for the Education of Young Children. Its recommendation is 75 square feet.
“To maintain a standard that we have is probably where I would lie at this point,” Wilson said.
