A centralized athletic complex for Lawrence public school district’s sports programs.

Office suites for high school faculty.

Modification of junior high school consumer science classrooms to get away from traditional cooking and sewing curriculum.

Those and other eye-catching possibilities were raised Tuesday during a three-hour school board study session with representatives of DLR Group, an Overland Park consulting firm inching its way toward a new facilities master plan for the district. That plan will become the basis of a multimillion-dollar school bond issue for facilities upgrades likely to be voted on in November.

Sue Morgan, the school board’s president, said the next DLR Group meeting in mid-July should start to bring together facilities dreamed up by the board and the realities of time and cost.

Outside of the media, no members of the public attended Tuesday’s session. That will change as plans solidify, board members predicted.

“The next meetings will generate a lot more interest,” Morgan promised.

Tuesday’s meeting focused on defining what a dream junior high school and high school would look like. The board and DLR Group previously did a pie-in-the-sky session on elementary schools.

In the next month, DLR Group will combine its analysis of the district’s existing facilities, match it with the board’s facilities benchmarks and generate cost estimates.

John Fuller of DLR Group said that work would generate the first round of options for improving district facilities. It will touch upon athletics facilities, teacher workspaces, home consumer science classrooms and dozens of other ideas.

In terms of sports facilities, DLR Group’s Jim French said the firm would outline the cost of addressing individual needs at Free State High School and Lawrence High School.

He said the company also would estimate the cost of developing, perhaps over a 20-year period, a community athletics complex.

For example, it might be less expensive in the long run to build one state-of-the-art soccer field than to build modest-priced fields for both high schools.

French said office suites, or teacher planning centers, could give high school educators higher quality work spaces in which they could collaborate with peers.

“These are very, very important spaces to teaching staff,” French said.

Free State has good teacher planning areas, he said, but most spaces at LHS are so small that faculty don’t use them. Three-fourths of LHS teachers use their classrooms as an office.

However, French said, relocating many of these teachers to planning centers would allow for more efficient use of classroom space.

Other possibilities raised by DLR Group:

Add an assistant principal at both high schools.

Limit junior high school enrollment to 600 students.

Commit to wireless computers and technology.