Board OKs refurbishing ex-LR school
Pulaski County Special School District leaders are in the early stages of reviving a building that until this past school year housed Robinson Middle School.
The School Board voted 6-0 Tuesday to contract with River City General Contractors of Little Rock at a cost of up to $486,000 to repair, paint, clean and landscape the old Robinson campus so that it can be used as an alternative school for highneed students and a professional development center for district staff members.
The board approved the plans for the vacant building at a meeting in which it also approved $12.3 million for the construction by Baldwin & Shell Construction Co. of a multipurpose arena at Sylvan Hills High School in Sherwood, and approved support-staff positions for the coming school year that include a few new positions but will, overall, result in more than $93,000 in personnel cost savings.
The 12,000-student district last August opened a new Robinson Middle School building just west of the old school at 21001 Arkansas 10 in west Little Rock.
Superintendent Charles McNulty said there is a districtwide need for an alternative education program for students who have significant need of support, such as mental health and other services, in addition to academic instruction, in a place that is not as restrictive as the current settings for those students at the different campuses.
McNulty said he envisions the program starting with as many as 18 students in grades six through eight in the coming school year. Additionally, the building’s media center could be used for training sessions for district staff. The school also could be used to occasionally serve students who participate in the district’s just-started virtual academy, he said.
Curtis Johnson, the district’s executive director of operations, said the site needs “quite a cleanup.” In addition to painting and power-washing, work at the site will include repairing holes and cracks, taking down ceiling tiles, installing new floor coverings, removing old cabinets and shelves, replacing rotted siding, and installing fencing.
Separate from the contract with River City General Contractors, Johnson said the district must upgrade plumbing and the heating and air conditioning at the site, as well as take steps to divert water that runs into the building from the back of the property.
In regard to Sylvan Hills, construction of the 48,594-square foot, multipurpose arena constitutes the final phase of a four-phase almost total rebuilding of the high school campus, Johnson said. The projected completion date for the area is September 2020.
Sylvan Hills’ new academic building is nearly complete and will open to students this August. The district has had to re-bid the different phases of the overall project to trim what could have been a $73 million total cost to $64.5 million, which is under the original $65 million projected cost.
The School Board’s 6-0 vote for the support staff jobs for the coming year means the district will have a new pupil services translator to be a liaison between the district and a growing number of non-English speaking families; two additional nurses, enabling every campus to have a nurse; a mobile device repair technician; two additional physical therapists/occupational therapists; and a marketing communications facilitator.
Some of the other changes include freezing the district’s chief financial officer position and creating a district treasurer’s job; deleting eight pre-kindergarten family service managers because a grant is expiring; and deleting the chief technology officer position but upgrading the director of technology operations, the senior instructional technology and professional development facilitator, instructional technology and digital learning facilitator and the technology project manager jobs.