Buildings audit results to be shown Tuesday
Hamilton County Schools officials are expected to unveil the system’s long-awaited facilities report Tuesday, and school board members say it will foreshadow long-term plans for the district’s aging buildings.
The audit was commissioned by Superintendent Bryan Johnson and the school board last fall, and MGT Consulting Group has been conducting it on the district’s more than 80 buildings this fall. Unveiling the report gained urgency when Hamilton County commissioners called for it as the district asked for increased funding, not for capital, but for operations in its original fiscal year 2020 budget report this year.
At 9:30 a.m. Tuesday, board members and commissioners will be meeting with representatives from MGT to discuss the report, but many said Monday that they didn’t need it to tell them what needed to be done to improve Hamilton County’s school buildings.
“I’m expecting to hear that we have about $600 [million] in deferred maintenance and facilities repair,” said board member Rhonda Thurman, of District 1. “I’m just afraid it’s going to be a half million dollar paperweight.”
The district has conducted facilities reviews before. The most recent review by an external contractor or group was in 1999, which reported more than $92 million in capital needs across 81 buildings. The district also adopted a facilities plan in 2007 that recommended closing 14 buildings and major renovations at another two dozen.
Many of those recommendations were never completed, though, even after the county allocated $110 million toward the district’s capital needs in 2017.
Thurman said many past administrators have “only looked for something to help them bolster what they want done.”
District 8 board member Tucker McClendon, the point person on the board for facilities, said he thinks Tuesday’s report will give the district a game plan.
“It’s going to give this district, the school board and the county commission a deeper look at infrastructure issues in our district. It will give us a road map to how we get our schools back up to the standards that we expect for our students,” he said.
McClendon predicts consolidations and school closures among the recommendations.
“I think our deferred maintenance number is going to be higher than some people expect,” he said. “It’s sometimes appalling the conditions that our students and teachers have to go to school in every day.”
District 3 board member Joe Smith said he was lucky to have many good schools in his region of the county and noted that most school officials shouldn’t be surprised by MGT’s findings.
“We’ve got a lot of buildings that are in bad shape and need a lot of repair, we know that,” he said. “We’ve probably got a lot of buildings that need to be closed, re-zoned and more consolidated, we know that.”
Smith said he’s confident that Johnson and the district will seek input from the community, commissioners and business leaders before coming up with a 10-year strategic plan for the districts’ schools.
District 9 board member Steve Highlander, one of several board members to have gotten a sneak peek at the report Monday night, said the board has authorized Johnson to develop a 10-year plan and that’s what he hopes to eventually see.
Most of the board members that the Times Free Press spoke with Monday didn’t think the facilities report would have any impact on this year’s budget.
Commissioners shot down a 34-cent property tax rate increase for public education last month, and several cited the lack of a capital plan as a reason why they voted against an increase.
The school board is scheduled to vote on a revised budget Thursday. It will then go back to the county commission for approval.
The county school board and the county commission will meet at 9:30 a.m. Tuesday at the county’s McDaniel Building, 455 N. Highland Park Ave., for a joint meeting to discuss the facilities report.