Rotarians learn Tri Star roots
NEW BREMEN — Tri Star Director Tim Buschur stopped by the New Bremen New Knoxville Rotary meeting on Tuesday morning to give club members insight to their new building and how much the compact career center has grown throughout the years.
The new building, Tri Star 2.0, was finished in the fall of 2019 and it can hold up to 625 students.
Buschur told Rotarians that Tri Star began in 1983, back when there were just three schools involved — Coldwater, Celina and St. Marys.
In 1985, the other six schools joined: New Bremen, New Knoxville, Minster, St. Henry, Fort Recovery and Marion Local.
“The state said ‘ if you don’t start getting career tech, we’re going to start taking money from you,’” said Buschur. “That got the attention of the superintendents.”
Through growth, the compact began to explore the possibility of having a central building that would benefit all students. Tri Star used to be made up of six locations within three different school districts.
In February of 2015, Buschur said Marion Local Superintendent Mike Pohlman joked about building a new building, something that he called “illegal.”
It being illegal was true, said Buschur, because compacts weren’t allowed to build new schools.
Buschur said he began looking at options and found help in current State Auditor Keith Faber who was president of the Ohio Senate at the time.
A law was created that allows compacts with nine schools that are in two different counties, that are adjacent to each other, with one of the counties being beside a different state to vote for a levy for one time.
The levy was 0.95 mill for 15 years and it passed in the summer of 2016.
“I want to thank you. We passed our levy by 75% which is unheard of,” said Buschur. “We had like 90 precincts and some passed by 95%. There was only three precincts that failed it. It was the highest passage of any Ohio’s schools facility project in the history of the projects. We were pretty excited about that.”
The building cost $25 million, with $8.2 million coming from the state and the rest of it was locally shared.
Buschur remarked that 75% of the building was built by companies in the nine school districts that Tri Star serves which was a goal of theirs.
He gave a rundown of some of the programs Tri Star offers, with IT cybersecurity being a new one added for this school year.
“Everybody needs that,” said Buschur. “We had 26 kids sign up which is huge.”
Tri Star will begin offering a two-year engineering degree next year as well.
Buschur said Tri Star has a “college feel” to it with the students attending truly wanting to be there.
“The kids say it doesn’t feel like a school,” he said. “That’s kind of neat, they want to come to school.”
As far as future expansion, Buschur said the school has the rights to buy up to five more acres on the ground that the 2.0 building currently sits.
“We have first dibs on five more acres. Land never gets cheaper so we may just buy an acre a year and then we have it,” he said.
Buschur joked that he won’t be around in 25 years when the career center expands, but commented on the process of getting the building completed from start to finish.