In the past decade, the Cleveland school district spent more than $18 million to repair and renovate 17 buildings that officials now plan to abandon.
Chief Executive Officer Eugene Sanders also has proposed scrapping construction of an elementary school after the district paid nearly $1.5 million to demolish the old building and design its replacement.
Sanders would essentially write off the investments under his “transformation plan,” a combination of academic reforms and streamlining he announced earlier this month. The state supplied more than half the money; the rest came from a $335 million bond issue approved by voters in 2001.
In a recent interview, Sanders said a looming $53 million deficit and the loss of more than 20,000 students since a state-funded building and renovation program began in 2002 leave him with little choice but to close schools. He targeted schools under a formula that considered academic performance, building condition, enrollment and factors such as attendance and violence.
Just under $10 million of the $18 million went to “warm, safe and dry” projects undertaken on the front end of the construction program.
Those emergency repairs, finished before Sanders arrived in 2006, were meant to keep buildings usable for as long as they were needed, even if that was only a few years. Workers often used lower-grade materials.
Of the balance, nearly $6.3 million was paid to replace the East High gym after its roof collapsed. The cave-in, which occurred in 2000, moved district officials to apply for the state building funds and go to the ballot for the property tax.
The state covered two-thirds of the gym expenses. But several schools underwent large renovations paid for entirely with the property tax because the work was not part of the construction project or the state did not consider it to be necessary.
The largest of the so-called “locally funded initiatives” was renovation of the former Margaret Spellacy Junior High to make it the site of Ginn Academy, an all-boys high school that moved in just last fall. Sanders plans to move Ginn to Glenville High School, which it would share with a new girls academy.
The renovation cost $601,336, according to a breakdown supplied by a school finance official, but another district report indicates the tab ran as high as $775,000.
The district spent more than $336,000 at Empire Computech Elementary School to repair decaying wood windows, paint and make heating improvements, said Gary Sautter, deputy chief of capital programs. He said the district may get more mileage out of the renovation by using the school as temporary space for students displaced by future construction.
South High received more than $324,000 in work, including air-conditioning repairs, renovation of space for the district’s only cosmetology program and painting.
The district spent $222,154 to reopen then-closed Kenneth W. Clement as an elementary school for boys in 2007. Workers repaired leaky heating and cooling systems, shored up damaged restrooms and replaced a roof. The single-gender program will remain intact but move to the new Euclid Park Elementary School scheduled to open in August.
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Article courtesy of: cleveland.com
