County considers leasing new school

The Palm Beach County School District is considering a new approach to building schools — letting the private sector handle it.

A proposed high school west of Boynton Beach would be operated, but not owned, by the school district, under a proposal the School Board plans to consider Wednesday.

Public School Property Development LLC, which has previously focused on developing charter schools, has submitted a proposal to build the school and then enter into a long-term lease with the school district.

“We can’t build. We don’t have the money,” said School Board member Karen Brill, who represents the west Boynton Beach area. “This would be the answer to the prayers of many young families in west Boynton Beach.”

Although the school district will receive about $1.6 billion from a sales tax passed in November, this will be devoted mostly to fixing up decaying schools, upgrading technology and buying school buses, not building new schools.

Right now, the only school in the area is Park Vista High on Jog Road, which is too crowded to accommodate all the students in the area. So some students in the western region travel for 20 minutes or more to attend Olympic Heights High, west of Boca Raton, Santaluces High in Lantana and Boynton Beach High near Interstate 95.

“Commuting in the morning is getting worse and worse,” Brill said.

The 300,000-square-foot school could open as soon as the fall of 2019 on a 65-acre property on Boynton Beach Boulevard between Lyons Road and U.S. 441. The project would use the same architect and a similar design to Park Vista, which opened in 2004.

Traditionally, the school district has always built schools itself.

But it’s getting harder to do that, officials said. Last year, the state Legislature placed caps on how much districts can spend on new schools, even using local sources.

High schools, for example, can cost no more than $30,318 per student, or about $76 million for a typical school with 2,500 students. District officials say it’s tough to build a high school with the same quality as existing facilities with that budget.

But even if they stayed within the caps, state dollars allocated for new schools have been shrinking, said Democratic State Sen. Joseph Abruzzo, a west Boynton Beach resident who helped orchestrate the proposal.

Another challenge is the state often prevents districts from building new schools if there are already empty seats in the county that could be filled through a boundary change. But there is no such rule when it comes to leasing space.

The developer expects to be able to build the schools slightly cheaper than the school district would pay, said Gary Gerson, a lawyer who represents Public School Property Development. He said the project doesn’t have a specific price tag yet. That will be dependent on what features the school district wants to include, he said.