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8-1-04 - By Ron Bird Here are my comments regarding surplus property. I do not presume this a dissenting opinion nor is it a majority opinion, since no formal vote was taken or any serious in-depth discussions undertaken by the committee.
Use of the Closed Acton Campus Given the desire of the School District and the community to secure funding to build a permanent high school on the Vasquez site, the number one priority for the Acton site is to temporarily house students to accommodate our students during this new high schools’ construction. The current plan is to build the new buildings in the exact location where the existing high school relocatables are located. The plan requires an expenditure of approximately one million dollars to temporarily relocate these buildings to the existing football field during this one to two year construction period. Given that our district has a vacant facility now, a cost savings approach is to move the high school temporarily directly to the Acton Campus. An alternate option is to temporarily move the high school to the High Desert site and also move the High Desert Middle School to the Acton site during this construction period. Inadequate parking is an issue in temporarily moving the high school directly to the Acton site.
Given this need for temporary space for our high school students during the permanent high school construction process, no lease arrangements for the Acton campus should be negotiated that extends beyond a one-year term. We do not know when funding will be obtained to build the new high school, but when funding is obtained it is assumed that construction can begin right after the school year ends. If the district obtains the adjacent land to the east of the Vasquez site and decides to erect the permanent structures on that land, this will allow for the temporary Vasquez buildings to remain in their current location while the permanent structures are constructed. In this case the Acton campus probably can be leased for a term for longer than one year. The criteria for the length of this lease should be based on a minimum five-year enrollment projection window that can be obtained from the professionally commissioned Facility Need Justification Study that is currently underway. This will provide for cohort based enrollment projections that will prove more accurate and more detailed than the rough estimates provided to the committee by the administration. The enrollment estimates from this Facility Need Justification Study can then be used in conjunction with the districts plans to determine how best to re-institute Kindergarten and grade 3 class size reduction and determine if any of the Acton campus is needed to implement these plans. Any excess space can then be used for the following uses:
1st Priority: Use of the facility as a home school center. This would bring students back to our district that are currently being home schooled, and would thereby increase our ADA and enrollment.
2nd Priority: Use of the facility for Adult Education. It must be noted, however, that there is limited parking on the Acton School site. The Surplus Property Committee strongly urges the District to take this in to account when leasing to providers of Adult Education. We encourage the District to limit the Adult Ed classes based on available parking facilities.
3rd priority: Use of the facility as a Community Center, with the understanding that community functions and clubs existing on the campus on a regular basis would need to generate revenue for the District in some manner.
It must be noted that there are parking concerns at the site, so the Board is urged to take parking limitations in to account when leasing the site to proposed renters, and that consideration be given to programs that are drop-off and pick-up oriented, as opposed to activities that require substantial long term parking.
Because Acton has community standards, it is further recommended that the community standards be followed closely, with any additional requirements for lighting being compliant with these guidelines.
The property should be the available to be returned for district use as a school site at the termination any lease arrangement. Therefore, it is our recommendation that the site not be physically altered so substantially as to preclude it from a fairly easy return to use as a school site.
Ron Bird – Surplus Property Committee member – 08/01/2004
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