The Jacksonville/North Pulaski School Board on Monday finalized the sale of $46.04 million in construction bonds, clearing one of the final financial hurdles necessary to build a high school and elementary school and pay for additions to two elementary schools.
A team of some 21 underwriters assembled by Robert W. Baird & Company Inc. is purchasing the bonds at an interest rate of 3.237229 percent to be paid off by the district over the next 23 years.
"We are really rolling," Jacksonville/North Pulaski Superintendent Tony Wood said after the vote about the construction projects, which are to be completed within about two years.
The projects include the building of an elementary campus to replace the Tolleson and Arnold Drive elementaries by August 2018, the addition of multipurpose rooms at Bayou Meto and Murrell Taylor elementaries to be finished later this calendar year, and a new Jacksonville High School campus to open in August 2019.
The bond issue comes as part of an effort by the fledgling 4,000-student school district to comply with federal court requirements in a long-running school desegregation lawsuit to make its older campuses equivalent to much newer schools elsewhere in Pulaski County, including in Sherwood and Maumelle.
The Jacksonville/North Pulaski district will mark its first year of operating separately from the Pulaski County Special School District on July 1. As a condition for detaching from the Pulaski County Special district, the Jacksonville/North Pulaski district had to commit to meeting the same desegregation obligations as the county district from which it was carved.
Last year, voters in the new district approved a 7.6-mill property tax increase, to a total tax rate of 48.3 mills, to help pay the anticipated bond debt for the construction projects.
Earlier this year, the Arkansas Public School Academic Facilities and Transportation Commission approved about $28 million in state funding for the Jacksonville/North Pulaski School District projects. That is part of the state's Academic Facilities Partnership Program that was begun in 2006 to modernize the state's public schools.
The Jacksonville district had sought to separate from the Pulaski County Special School District in large part to qualify for state assistance in building replacement schools for its aging campuses.
The state's share of a building project is based on a school district's property-tax wealth, with wealthier districts qualifying for smaller percentages of state aid or even no state building aid. The state's share of the Jacksonville/North Pulaski projects is about 47 percent of the construction costs.
"The elementary school has been bid. The site is almost clear," Wood said Monday night. " The elementary school is on go," he said.
And the district will open bids to build the high school July 17, he said.
The district will also use its share of state desegregation aid from both the 2016-17 and 2017-18 school years -- about $10 million total -- for the building projects, Wood said. That desegregation aid will end to the districts in Pulaski County after the coming 2017-18 school year.
The bond issue finalized Monday is the second for the new district, Wood said.
Previously the district issued about $15.8 million in bonds of which almost $11 million was used to reimburse the Pulaski County Special district for its 10 school campuses that became part of the new district.
Scott Beardsley, senior vice president of First Security Beardsley, a division of Crews & Associates Inc., assisted the Jacksonville district in issuing the bonds, which he said attracted bids from four different organizations.
While the Robert W. Baird & Company Inc. bid was the lowest, the other bidders on the bonds and their proposed interest rates were Morgan Stanley & Co., 3.279154 percent; Bank of America Merrill Lynch, 3.296392 percent; and Wells Fargo Bank N.A., 3.43 percent.
The district's annual debt payment on the newly issued bonds will be between $2.74 million and $2.85 million until 2041.
At that time, the district will have repaid the principal of $46,040,000 and $20,519,337 in interest, according to payment schedules provided to the School Board by Beardsley.
The district's new high school is expected to cost about $63 million. The replacement elementary school for Arnold Drive and Tolleson elementaries is projected to cost about $16 million.
Metro on 06/06/2017