The Park Hill Elementary School in North Little Rock is changing owners.
The North Little Rock School Board voted 5-0 at a short special meeting Thursday to approve the sale of the vacant, red-brick elementary school at 3801 JFK Blvd. to I-40 Kerr LLC for $530,000.
The money will go into the district's operating fund, School Board President Darrell Montgomery said.
The sale is occurring at a time when the district is seeking ways to cut expenses and generate new revenue to offset the scheduled loss of $7.6 million a year in state desegregation aid. That special funding will end after the 2017-18 school year as the result of a 2014 settlement agreement in a long-running federal school desegregation lawsuit.
The Park Hill school, which sits on 5.27 acres, is among the last of the properties that the North Little Rock district has had on the market after a capital improvement project that reduced 21 occupied campuses to 13 -- nearly all of which were built anew or extensively remodeled.
The district continues to own the Poplar Street campus, 2300 Poplar St., and North Heights Elementary, 4901 N. Allen St. Those sites are being used for storage for the time being and are not being actively marketed, Superintendent Kelly Rodgers said Thursday.
Previously sold district properties include the Argenta, Rose City, Lynch Drive, Baring Cross, Redwood and the old Amboy school buildings.
The sale of the Park Hill school will free the district from the responsibility of paying insurance, security and utilities on a campus that has been vacant nearly two years, Rodgers said.
Pupils living in the Park Hill attendance zone were reassigned to either the all new Lakewood Elementary School or the remodeled Ridgeroad Elementary School starting with the 2015-16 school year.
In addition to saving maintenance costs on unused buildings, district leaders were motivated to sell vacant buildings that could otherwise keep the school system from qualifying for state financial aid for new schools or expansions in the future.
The Arkansas Department of Education's Public School Academic Facilities and Transportation Division takes into account the available existing classroom space in a district when distributing money for school construction.
I-40 Kerr LLC, a real estate investor organization, was represented in the school purchase by McKimmey Associates, Realtors and selling agent Bryon McKimmey. McKimmey, who is also the registered agent for I-40 Kerr, did not return a phone call to his office Thursday afternoon about the potential use for the school lot.
North Little Rock School Board member Scott Teague who served as the point person for the board on some of the recent transactions, said Thursday that he assumed the purchase was done in anticipation of finding a purpose.
Teague noted that conditions on the sale restrict the buyer from using or leasing the property for a school or any other use that would compete with the North Little Rock district. Additionally, because of the Park Hill location, any proposed use would also be subject to review by city authorities, Teague said.
In the event that the buyer decides to sell the property to a third party within the next three years, the North Little Rock district will have the right to repurchase the property.
Teague said he was pleased with the outcome of the different property sales.
"It feels good to be able to get those properties sold," he said. "So far, most of the folks that have bought them have re-purposed them in a productive way."
Metro on 02/17/2017