New Tampa Road Projects Still On The Way!

A new roundabout for Highwoods Preserve Pkwy., a new coat of paving for New Tampa Blvd. and a number of new enhancements for Tampa Palms Blvd. remain in the New Tampa/District 7 pipeline for Fiscal Year 2021, according to Tampa City Council member Luis Viera.

Issues like lawsuits and Covid-19 have slowed some of the projects down.

“They’re coming, though,” Viera says. “They’re coming.”

One project that likely already would have been done, or certainly would’ve been underway by now, are the long-awaited repaving and enhancements of New Tampa Blvd., from the New Tampa Gateway Bridge to Bruce B. Downs Blvd.

Long a prickly point with many West Meadows residents, the repaving was on the list of items that were supposed to be expedited after the All For Transportation (AFT) referendum passed in 2019, with 57 percent of voters agreeing to a one-cent sales tax increase to be used for transportation projects.

The New Tampa Blvd. project was slated to receive $1.3 million of the $280 million a year for 30 years the tax was expected to yield. However, Hillsborough County Commissioner Stacy White challenged the referendum language and it is now tied up in the Florida Supreme Court, which has yet to make a decision. A back-up plan for another referendum this fall has been postponed until 2022, as Covid-19 has taken precedence.

There is some good news — the New Tampa Blvd. project concept design is being funded by the City of Tampa. 

“However, it can’t be completed without AFT funds, which really stinks,” says Viera, who pushed hard for New Tampa to receive some immediate improvements due to its support for the referendum, only to see it get tied up in litigation. “Moving forward with the design means they are married to the idea. So, if the AFT money doesn’t come through, it will still be funded. It’s just going to be on a longer timeline.”

The same goes for Tampa Palms Blvd., which had a total of $700,000 earmarked for Complete Streets programming, which is a Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) plan for improving pedestrian and bicyclist safety and “building the right road in the right place for the right purpose.”

The Tampa Palms Blvd. project is supposed to include operational improvements to its two Compton Dr. intersections —  namely potential roundabouts to replace four-way stops — as well as roadway improvements like enhanced crosswalks, sidewalks and bulb-outs (also called curb extensions) along the roadway’s 4-mile loop.

One project that won’t be held up by AFT funds is a roundabout currently being designed for the intersection of Highwoods Preserve Pkwy. and Highwoods Palm Way/Bridle Club Dr. 

The roundabout will help calm traffic at the busy intersection that leads out of the Highwoods Preserve Corporate Campus (home to thousands of employees at MetLife, Syniverse and T-Mobile) and, on the other side of Highwoods Preserve Pkwy., the Equestrian Parc at Highwoods Preserve apartment complex.

The design is expected to be completed by the end of this year, with construction expected in 2021.

Outside The Box, Inside The Pod?

Although Hillsborough County is giving parents three choices for the upcoming fall semester, it really comes down to two choices — learn in a traditional classroom with other students, restoring the social interaction and face-to-face contact that are the stalwarts of education; or learn in a more isolated and individual-based online format at home that makes it easier to avoid contracting the virus and transmitting it to others.

However, there is a group of local parents considering something else — merging the classroom and online settings together in a unique collaboration that, they believe, will offer the best of both worlds.

Tampa Palms resident Jenni Wolgemuth, an Associate Professor of measurement and research at the USF College of Education and mother of a first- and fifth-grader, is helping to organize a group of 4-5 families whose children will learn online, but will learn together in a small “learning pod” overseen by a privately hired learning support specialist.

“A one-room school house,” Wolgemuth calls it. “It is an attempt to create a bubble around a group of families, all agreeing to similar standards of social distancing.”

That school house, or learning “pod,” that Wolgemuth has organized will have nine students in it. Four of the students are fifth graders, who would hopefully have the same teachers at the charter school they all attended last year.

The pod also will include two first-graders, a third grader, an eighth grader and a ninth-grader. The parents would rotate hosting and the kids would bring their lunches and eat together and have time for outdoor activities together, too.

Everyone would still be taught by their school’s teachers through the online platform and Zoom video classrooms used by their schools. However, the parents are already interviewing people to be a support specialist, who would monitor the pod from 8 a.m.-3 p.m. and help the students with technology issues, staying on task and doing their assignments.

“Basically what we would have been doing if we had been home,” Wolgemuth says.

The idea was Wolgemuth’s brainchild and she says she began thinking about the learning pod solution before the Hillsborough School District issued its choices for parents. She thought the District was too comfortable with the idea that everything would be fine by August. “I’m a planner,” she says. “This was my plan A.”

She mentioned the concept to friends, but the response, at first, was tepid. She continued, however, to bring it up in conversations.

When she had a Zoom call with other parents after the choices were revealed by the District, there was still some hesitation. During that call with other mothers, however, one of the husbands, a doctor who works with Covid-19 patients, overheard the plan.

“That is a really good idea,” he said, and the plan started to take root.

There are still hoops to jump through for Wolgemuth and her group, which includes a second Tampa Palms family, two families from Lutz and another from Carrollwood. 

They will have to see how the pod works for the younger students, namely the two first graders. And, having nine or so computers using the same WiFi network could create issues that would need to be addressed.

Otherwise, Wolgemuth thinks the idea is the best fix for one semester, with the hopes that the coronavirus can be brought under control and that everyone can go back to their brick-and-mortar schools in January.