CHAPEL HILL - Participants at a Chapel Hill 2020 presentation on the Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools on Thursday urged new Superintendent Tom Forcella to explore more creative and unconventional approaches to education and collaboration with the community.

The ideas residents tossed out varied from establishing smaller specialized high schools to beginning intramural sports programs to sharing bus services with Chapel Hill Transit.

"I'd like to see something like the 2020 process done for the schools," said Vivian Olkin, a parent. "I think we need some brainstorming, some looking for new ideas that are out of the box."

"I expected that a community with an education school and so many parents with smart ideas would produce more creative approaches than I've seen."

Chapel Hill 2020 is a wide-ranging community-wide effort to create a new comprehensive plan to guide the town's future.

Forcella said that although not all the ideas suggested Thursday are likely to prove feasible, the school system is already preparing to launch its own long-range planning process.

Called "The Greenhouse Project: Growing and Thinking Everyday," the process will open with a daylong event in March.

"We'll focus on teaching and learning," Forcella said. "We hope community involvement and conversation will help us establish a set of core beliefs and shared themes that will serve as the foundation of our new plan."

Todd LoFrese, assistant superintendent for support services, said that after student enrollment slowed during the economic recession, it has rebounded this year.

Elementary school enrollment has been at or above 100 percent of capacity since 2000, he said, and is projected to hit 105 percent in the next academic year. That would trigger the Schools Adequate Public Facilities Ordinance, or SAPFO, which links new residential development to available classroom space.

The elementary crunch increases the urgency to complete Elementary School No. 11, which is under construction and scheduled to open in August 2013 in the Northside neighborhood.

The district expects to need a fifth middle school in 2017-18 and a 12th elementary school in 2018-19.

No new high schools are planned during the next decade, LoFrese said, but the district expects to add a new classroom wing to Carrboro High School in 2020-21.

"One of the things we're facing in addition to increasing enrollment is that we have many older schools," LoFrese said. "Over half of our schools were built more than 40 years ago, and a few were built more than 60 years ago."

The district will do a comprehensive study to analyze the needs of those aging buildings.

Pressure on the schools' facilities comes not only from students but from the many community groups that rent school space for various functions. During 2010-11, more than 200 different groups rented school facilities more than 2,500 times.

Butch Kisiah, Chapel Hill's Parks and Recreation director, told Forcella and LoFrese that he hopes the school district and the town can partner to build and maintain future facilities.

"I think it would be good for both of us, especially as you build new elementary schools," he said. "The middle and high school facilities are used to death, but the elementary schools are another situation. We could both get what we need, share costs and benefit the community.

"Because, in the end, they're all our kids. At 3:15 in the afternoon, and during the weekends and summer, your kids become our kids. We need to make sure we're working together for them."