Before architects can finish designing three Concord elementary schools, the school board must decide class size, length and location.

Questions of where preschool classes will meet and how many children can learn from one teacher will determine how many classrooms are built at the schools on the sites of Kimball, Conant and Broken Ground schools. With a per-room price tag one board member puts at $250,000, members say they are loath to commission unnecessary space. But they must build large enough so that any building expansions will be far, far in the future.

"You want to just find that sweet spot where you're not overbuilding but you're not underbuilding," said board President Kass Ardinger. "That's the big gamble."

Board members have met in committee for months to discuss the benefits of full-day kindergarten, the configuration of preschool offerings and the ideal class size for the elementary grades. But they have brought none of these questions to a vote, instead calling a morning retreat today where they will try to find consensus on the classrooms. Any formal votes will be taken at the monthly meeting Monday.

Members say the board is unlikely to extend kindergarten to a full day or change class size policy, but it will have to consider how district preschool programs are configured and the class size used in architectural schemes.

"The big decision is how are we going to do preschool in the future," said Clint Cogswell, chairman of the instructional committee. "Each classroom added to the construction project is approximately a quarter-million dollars. It's not a cheap process."

Cogswell calculated that cost using figures from the state education department for classroom size and cost.

The district now provides preschool at Eastman and Rumford schools to children ages 3 to 5 who are in special education, as well as peers who pay to enroll in those classes. Preschool is also provided in the district with separate federal funding, but the district is not required to offer those programs.

With Dame, Eastman and Rumford schools slated for closure, the board must decide where preschool will be held. Members are contemplating putting classrooms for special education preschool in Beaver Meadow, where there is room available, and in a new school to be built beside Broken Ground, said Cogswell. Ardinger said a decision could be made between Conant and Beaver Meadow.

Locating more than one preschool class in a building increases efficiency, as staff who work with specialized needs can move among classes, said Barbara Hemingway, preschool coordinator for the district. But there are also disadvantages to consolidating preschool, she said, as when students bused across town are prevented from connecting with their neighborhood schools until kindergarten.

Board members must also approve the class sizes used by architects to plan the number of classrooms in each school. While the district has maintained its class size policy for decades, Cogswell said it makes sense to build for slightly smaller classes that would allow for slight population increases or decreased class sizes.

"People will say, this project is expensive enough, why build classrooms you might not use?" Cogswell said. "A good argument, but very short-sighted. . . . A little bit of play in class size is just smart."

As the architects work on schematic design, they are using class sizes that allow a bit of a "fudge factor," Cogswell said. The design class size for kindergarten, 17 students, is on the high end but the other elementary grades are being planned for smaller class sizes than required, he said. First and second grades are being planned with 18 students in a classroom, while the policy calls for classes between 18 and 22 students, he said. Third- through fifth-grade classes are being planned with 23 students, while the policy calls for 23 to 27 students, he said.

Members are not considering a change to class-size policy, said Cogswell and Ardinger, but they have read and discussed research on the effects of small class sizes. The studies indicated that small classes have the most profound effect on young students, Cogswell said.

"Being in a small class early on made a really big difference," he said. "And the more years they were in a small class, the larger the difference was."

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