District alters plan for site of new Arkansas school

A map showing the location of Tolleson Elementary
A map showing the location of Tolleson Elementary

Jacksonville/North Pulaski School District leaders are planning a change in the selected site for a new elementary school to avoid the possibility of an expensive midcourse correction.

Superintendent Tony Wood and his staff will recommend to the district's School Board at a 6 p.m. meeting Monday that the new replacement school for Tolleson and Arnold Drive elementary schools be built on the Tolleson Elementary property, which is land owned by the school system.

The Jacksonville/North Pulaski district is a party in the long-running Pulaski County federal school desegregation lawsuit and, as such, is obligated to equalize the condition of its older schools -- including the two elementaries -- with the newer schools elsewhere in Pulaski County.

The Tolleson land would be used instead of leasing nearby, undeveloped property from Little Rock Air Force Base, which had been the plan for the past several months.

Phyllis Stewart, the district's chief of staff, said Friday that the school district hasn't been able to execute a lease with the Air Force for the initial site.

There are no objections to the lease, she said, but it is a time-consuming process to accomplish and district leaders are unwilling to direct architects and contractors to do necessary design work and site preparation for the school until the lease is in hand.

"We didn't want to start the design phase and find out later on that ... you are not going to be able to have the property, you aren't going to be able to secure the lease," she said.

There were other little wrinkles, too.

"The Air Force base was also working with us already on an environmental study, and something had come up about the habitat for the rattlesnake moth," Stewart said about the first site.

"That might not have been a problem at all," she added. "We probably could have worked through that, but we still were not able to get a confirmation of a lease."

Also, the Jacksonville/North Pulaski district had applied for U.S. Department of Defense funding for the new elementary school. To qualify for the funding, the new school would have to be planned for military-owned property. The Jacksonville/North Pulaski district was pretty far down the list for the funding, but district officials had hoped that another applicant would be unable to provide the required matching funds and fall off the funding list.

That has not happened, Stewart said, adding that one or more applications in California that had initial difficulty in providing matching funds has been able to do so.

Faced with no certainty on a lease and a looming 2018 deadline to open the elementary school, district leaders turned to the Tolleson property as an alternative, Stewart said.

Tolleson is at 601 Harris Road, adjacent to the Jacksonville Middle School campus, formerly North Pulaski High School, at 718 Harris Road. The district leases the property for Jacksonville Middle School from the base.

The first site for the new elementary school is directly across Harris Road from the middle school.

School district administrators will ask the School Board on Monday to purchase a little over four acres of privately owned land at the intersection of Harris Road and General Samuels Road. With that additional land, a new elementary school can be built on the Tolleson site with frontage on General Samuels and side access to Harris Road, Stewart said.

The cost is $15,000 per acre, according to agenda item documents presented to board members.

The existing Tolleson Elementary School would remain in operation during the construction of the building, after which the school would likely be torn down. The new school would replace the existing Tolleson and Arnold Drive schools. Arnold Drive School is on the base.

The Tolleson site would not need as much site preparation as the undeveloped site owned by the Air Force, Stewart said, adding that district leaders would like to start the design work right away.

Voters in the Jacksonville district in February approved a 7.6-mill property tax increase to help the district finance the construction of a new high school and the replacement school for the Tolleson and Arnold Drive elementaries.

U.S. District Judge D. Price Marshall Jr., on Jan. 14 this year, approved the Jacksonville district's building plan for the high school and elementary school as well as for the addition of multipurpose rooms at the remaining four elementary schools. The judge also directed the district to present plans to him by the end of this calendar year for replacing those four elementaries, which are Murrell Taylor, Pinewood, Bayou Meto and Warren Dupree elementaries.

Metro on 10/01/2016

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