LITTLE ROCK — The Pulaski County Special School District will combine $20 million from its building fund with the $81 million from the issue of second-lien bonds to pay for a new high school in Maumelle and a middle school in Sherwood, putting the combined cost at over $100 million.
The district’s School Board at a special meeting Monday voted 4-1 in favor of the plan to spend a total of $26.5 million from the district’s $30.5 million building fund.
The bulk of the building fund will go to the two new Maumelle and Sherwood campuses, but $2 million will be used toward the expansion of Pine Forest Elementary in Maumelle, $3.5 million for replacing the roof at Crystal Hill Elementary near Maumelle and $1 million for the ongoing roof replacement project at Clinton Elementary in Sherwood.
The current $30.5 million balance will drop to $4 million, according to the plan presented to the board by Acting Superintendent Rob McGill.
But that will increase to $11 million after matching funds provided by the state are paid. The state reimburses most school districts for a portion of their academic building costs after projects are completed.
The district’s building reserve is typically funded with transfers from district operating funds. It is considered one-time money. Once spent, the fund is not automatically replenished.
Teams of architects and contractors attended the board’s special meeting Monday and were prepared make a presentation on the plans for the two new schools, one of which will replace Oak Grove High School and the other to replace Sylvan Hills Middle School.
However, the presentation was not made. McGill explained in a later interview that the meeting “took a different direction” from what he had originally planned - but he would not elaborate.
During the meeting, board member Bill Vasquez of Jacksonville cast the only no vote on the spending plan. Board President Tim Clark of Maumelle, Charllie Wood of Sherwood, Gwen Williams of McAlmont and Mildred Tatum of southeast Pulaski County voted for it.
Vasquez argued that the plan would all but deplete the building fund at a time when Jacksonville area residents are hopeful of separating from the Pulaski County Special district within the next year to form an independent Jacksonville school district.
If or when that happens, the Pulaski County district and the new Jacksonville district would have to divide the county district’s assets, he said, but most of the building fund money will have been spent.
“About a third of that money rightly belongs to Jacksonville, and none of it is going to be spent in Jacksonville,” Vasquez said.
Wood noted that the School Board earlier this year approved excluding any new Jacksonville school system from assuming a share of the bond-issue debt the district is incurring for the two new campuses.
He supported that move, he said, but recalled predicting at the time that Jacksonville would want to share in the district’s assets.
“I believe there is a real good reason to use the building-fund money because I believe that if Jacksonville isn’t going to share in the debt, it should not get to share in the assets,” he said.
“And it’s not true that we ignore Jacksonville,” Wood added, pointing to the district’s expenditure of about $900,000 to establish a Star Academy this year in the building vacated by the Jacksonville Middle School for Girls.
The academy is for students at Jacksonville High School who are struggling in a traditional school session and have the potential to leave school before graduating. The academy is the only one of its kind in the district, Wood said.
Vasquez disputed that the district started the academy out of any largess but did so because “it was the right thing to do” and the state required the district to restructure Jacksonville High. That is because the school had been on the state’s improvement list for more than five years as a result of chronically low student test scores.
Financing the replacement schools for Oak Grove High and Sylvan Hills Middle has been a huge point of contention among School Board members, administrators and parents this year, and even played a part in the sudden resignations of Superintendent James Sharpe and Chief Financial Officer Larry O’Briant in March.
Sharpe and O’Briant had warned that the district would not be able to meet the annual debt payments on the 27-year bonds after the first couple of years.
The state Board of Education also became embroiled in the issue, initially rejecting the district’s request for approval to sell the $81,365,000 in bonds - $51.4 million of which was for the high school and $28.5 million for the middle school, with the remainder going toward the cost of issuance and the underwriter’s discount allowance.
In May, the state Education Board approved the bond issue after district officials refined their plan for making annual payments of $4.5 million a year on the bond debt.
Arkansas, Pages 7 on 11/03/2009