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Shawnee Mission Early Childhood Education Center to relocate to Broadmoor over air quality concerns

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The district’s Early Childhood Education and Parents as Teachers programs will be moving to Broadmoor over the holiday break.

The Shawnee Mission School District announced today that it will be relocating its Early Childhood Center (SMECEC) operations from their current home at 9700 W. 96th Street to the Broadmoor Technical Center over the holiday break.

This fall, staff who worked in the building raised concerns about air quality inside the current location, which used to be Katherine Carpenter Elementary School. Some staff said they were experiencing respiratory issues that they attributed to the air inside the building.

District officials said they commissioned two separate air quality tests, neither of which produced results showing any areas of concern. However, administrators decided to relocate all functions currently housed in the building to Broadmoor so that they could conduct a full evaluation of the SMECEC facility. In addition to the SMECEC functions, the district will also be moving the Parents as Teachers, the district audiologist and itinerant staff who are located in the building on 96th Street.

“We’re fortunate that as a district we have a space where we can move,” Chief Communications Officer David Smith said.

The move will happen over the holiday break. In hopes of fully accommodating staff during the move, classes for early childhood programs will not be held as initially scheduled on Monday, Jan. 7, and will instead convene for the first time of the new semester on Tuesday, Jan. 8.

The Broadmoor Technical Center, which is located at 6701 W. 83rd St. in Overland Park, is largely vacant since the relocation of many of the programs it housed to the Center for Academic Achievement in 2017. Broadmoor has served as the temporary home for other district functions in recent years, as well. For the 2015-16 school year, Briarwood Elementary students attended classes at Broadmoor while their new school was being constructed.

About the author

Jay Senter
Jay Senter

Jay Senter is the founder and publisher of the Post.

He earned his bachelor’s degree in business at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, where he worked as a reporter and editor at The Badger Herald.

He went on to receive a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Kansas, where he earned the Calder Pickett Award. While he was in graduate school, he also worked as a reporter for the Lawrence Journal-World.

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