The Word on the Street column today has an interesting segment on the need for a new building in District 150’s Woodruff attendance area:

The biggest question that taxpayers should demand an answer to is this: Does District 150 know for sure it needs a new building?

Because, according to Hinton himself, the district only did a preliminary review of whether the school could cost-effectively be renovated.

“Glen Oak had a preliminary one, but not a final one,” Hinton said Friday.

Did you catch that? The school district has purchased eight houses at over $800,000, hired planners and architects to start designing a new school, made overtures to the park district toward a land-sharing agreement, etc., etc., and they’ve only done a preliminary review of whether the current Glen Oak School could cost-effectively be renovated.

If that sounds familiar, it could be because on April 19th, I took an in-depth look at the basis for the school district’s building plan, and concluded the same thing:

Yet, based on this “analysis,” the [Master Facilities Plan] report confidently concludes (emphasis mine): “The District has or will soon have the necessary match of funds derived both from available restricted reserves and the sale of a health-life-safety bond (for the replacement of a minimum of two and as many as six buildings the cost of which to remediate is greater than the cost of replacement).”

The report gives no justification for the statement in bold.

Nowhere in the report do they give a breakdown of what it would cost to renovate/expand the current buildings versus what it would cost to do a new construction (including acquisition, demolition, legal, and other hidden costs). There’s no feasibility study. All they’ve really done is identified which schools they feel (subjectively) are in greatest need of repair. That’s no basis upon which to start tearing down schools and building new ones on different sites.

Five months later, Mr. Hinton has confirmed my conclusions. I wonder when Hinton, et. al., were planning to do a “final” review. After the new school was completely built, perhaps? And what are they planning to do if it turns out the result is, “Well I’ll be dogged, I guess it is more cost-effective to renovate this building”? Will they renovate it and turn it into another office building, like they did with Blaine-Sumner Middle School?

What happened to the district’s efforts to save money? That’s how this whole thing started, you know. Closing 11 schools and building 6 new ones was supposed to save the district a bundle of money. Yet cost estimates for the new school in the Woodruff attendance area are already $7 million over budget, property acquisition costs are already over budget, and the $500,000 they were supposed to save by closing Blaine-Sumner has evaporated as they’ve instead put money into renovating it and keeping it open as an office building.

This is no way to run a school district, folks.