The Pembroke school district should close the Village school at the conclusion of the 2018-19 academic year, shift all kindergarten and first graders to Hill school, and use modular classrooms to accommodate the overflow in the short-term, a committee of parents, staff and residents recommended to the school board Monday.
Andy Camidge, the committee’s chairman and a Hill school parent, told the school board that committee members had started the process far apart on several issues and ultimately came to a unanimous conclusion. Using modulars, for example, was something he was originally dead-set against.
“We’ve done a lot of research on modulars. Modulars are not what they were in the ’80,” he said. “There’s plumbing, there’s air conditioning, there’s heating. These are good facilities. It would be ADA-compliant, wheelchair accessible.”
An architecture firm earlier this month estimated renovating and expanding the Hill school, which currently serves grades 2 through 4, would cost about $15.4 million. That number was higher than expected, Camidge said, but the committee still believed merging the two schools was the right way to go. The district also didn’t need to build something quite as ambitious as proposed by the architects, he said.
“If we built something a little bit more modest there’s a good chance that the savings from closing Village school could pay for a large part of that,” Camidge said.
Committee members also urged the school board to start putting money toward life-safety repairs at the Hill school as soon as possible.
“When we walked through all these buildings, it became very apparent, very quickly, that there is a disparity, a severe disparity, in the attention and resources that our elementary buildings get versus our two other buildings,” said committee member Kevin Foss.
There are rooms at the Hill school where ceiling tiles are caving in from the weight of insulation, Foss said, and holes in the ceiling. Kids in a music classroom missed a fire drill because the horns are in the hallway and don’t include a strobe. And the school’s server room doesn’t have air-conditioning, which means a hole was cut into the door to create ventilation.
“We’re going to have another Village school if we don’t start addressing this stuff,” Foss said.
Both Camidge and Foss acknowledged that the district is in a difficult financial and political situation after a recent budget shortfall and rising taxes. But they pushed the school board to make repairs at Hill a priority.
“We hope that there’s alternative funding sources available as well. And we would ask you to do everything possible to have people out there looking for grants, looking for anything that may be available. We understand the economic situation in Pembroke,” Camidge said.
The committee also recommended that the district’s preschool program be housed in the modulars. That’s because the programs are self-contained, which means students wouldn’t have to walk back and forth between the main building and the modulars to attend things like art or music. Preschool sessions are also just 2.5 hours long, so no student would be in a modular for a full day.
The school district put a spending freeze in place earlier this year in the hopes of creating a surplus to offset taxes after a budget shortfall spiked the tax rate this year. The goal was to return at least $1 million. Superintendent Patty Sherman told the board that the district was projecting a surplus of $1,138,000, and asked the board to release some money.
The board agreed, voting to release up to $125,000 to use strictly on life-safety repairs across the district.
The school board is next scheduled to discuss what to do with the two elementary schools at their meeting June 12.
(Lola Duffort can be reached at 369-3321 or lduffort@cmonitor.com.)