The future of Hills Elementary (continued)

What should people make of the board’s omission of Hills Elementary from the bond proposal? A look back at the process can shed some light on that.

At our October work session, our facilities director told the board:

If we’re going to finish Hills, let’s finish Hills, okay? I mean, it’s an unfinished building. The board made that conscious decision in 2013, in December of 2013, to just do the mandatory code updates, and that’s what we’ve done, but they’re in need of more classrooms, we just set two temporaries, or actually two, two duplexes, there’s four temporary classrooms there, their gym is totally inadequate, there are a lot of things that need to be done at Hills, so I put it on there for discussion. If we’re going to do it, it’s going to take three million to finish it and do it right.

So the materials presented for discussion that night showed a $3.2 million Hills project scheduled for completion in 2022. It included a new gym and four new classrooms.

At the same time, the facilities director presented a similar choice to the board about TREC (the former Roosevelt Elementary):

If we’re going to keep that building, which may be another decision for another day, this needs to be moved up [to 2020-21 in the timeline], so that at that point, we’re air-conditioned a hundred percent.

By January, though, the picture had changed, for both Hills and TREC. By the time the board settled on a bond proposal, it had decided to put neither facility into the seven-year bond-funded period. In the case of TREC, the explicit administration recommendation was to start looking for new homes for the programs there in anticipation of closing the building.

In both cases, the administration told us: If we’re going to do these, let’s do them. In response, the board took both facilities out of the bond-funded seven-year period and put them on the unfunded “future needs” list. Are Hills residents unreasonable to be concerned about the future of their school?

Mixed messages, part 3

As I wrote in part 2, I came away from our October work session with the impression that the district could choose to drop projects from the bond proposal even after the voters approved it. That message was reinforced in January, as the board discussed the future of TREC (the former Roosevelt Elementary School). The administration raised the possibility that we would include renovations to TREC in the bond proposal, but while putting them far enough out on the timeline that we might be able to choose to dispose of the property altogether, rather than do the projects. From the discussion:

Director Roesler: If we put this project in the bond language and then don’t do it, is that not a problem?

Superintendent Murley: Yeah, not doing it is not a problem. So, like I say, we put it in there because we would hate to get the point and not be able to do the renovations on it, but ideally we would get to that point and not need to.

(Full recording here.)

So again, it sounded like we could drop projects altogether, regardless of whether it was foreseeable at the outset that we might not want to do the project. The superintendent reiterated that idea later in the same meeting.

(Ultimately the board decided not to include the TREC renovations in the bond proposal; they now appear in the list of “future needs” with no current funding source.)

Continued in part 4.