MORE ROOM TO GROW
Board moves toward $17M renovation of Spring City Elementary
With an 8-1 vote, the Spring-Ford Area School Board started down the path toward a $17.4 million renovation and expansion of Spring City Elementary School.
The vote, which David Shafer was the only board member to oppose, does not commit the district to the full project. The administration, working with the school board’s building committee, set the project up with three decision points.
The affirmative vote Monday night checks off the first one. It authorized the district to spend up to $341,000 to meet with experts to draw up some conceptual schematics for the renovation and 7,000-square-foot addition of the 64-year-old building.
“This vote is for schematics only,” said board member Clinton Jackson, who chairs the board’s building committee.
Robert Hunter, the district’s director of facilities, said the second decision point will come in August when formal architectural and engineering designs based on the schematics would be commissioned at a cost of about $1.8 million.
The third and final decision will come in April of 2024 and that is when the board must decide whether to proceed with construction. If the board goes forward, the school would be closed for a year and the students sent to other elementary schools until the work was done.
During a presentation given at the March 20 work session, Hunter told the board that since January, the administration has been wrestling with the question of what to do with the school given its small size, outdated facilities and projected increase in enrollment.
Options explored included:
• Closing the school and re-districting all the students to other schools;
• Doing a simple upgrade of
facilities without expanding the footprint, which has a price tag of $10.7 million;
• Renovating and expanding the school, with an estimated price tag of $17.4 million;
• Demolishing the building and erecting a new Spring City Elementary School at a price tag of $24.5 million, which Hunter described as “cost prohibitive.”
Superintendent Robert Rizzo told the board that the administration chose the third option to provide Spring City’s students parity with the other elementary schools, as well as to provide the most flexibility with the 10year capital plan for the district’s other buildings.
“If we close Spring City we