Tyler

By MEGAN MIDDLETON
Staff Writer

In its $124.9 million bond package, Tyler ISD hopes to carry on with its original plan to address elementary schools first as it works to deal with aging facilities across the district, employing a multi-phase approach.

Phase 1, a $96 million bond program voters approved in 2004, included construction of six replacement schools -- Bell, Ramey, Douglas, Austin, Bonner and Peete elementary schools -- and one new campus, Jack Elementary. Peete, the last to be completed, opened in January.

"We did seven in the first phase in 2004 and so we determined that what we needed to do was adhere to the commitment that we made to the community and stick with our elementary schools to complete that process first," Tyler ISD Superintendent Dr. Randy Reid said of the process of developing this 2008 bond package.

This Phase 2 bond package would replace Clarkston, Griffin, Jones, Orr and Woods elementary schools and the St. Louis School for special needs students.

If a bond issue were to pass, Reid has said the district would like to see as many of these schools open in the fall of 2010 as possible, but the acquisition of land and design challenges may require an extra year for some projects.

The district will need new land for Griffin as well as a Jones/St. Louis joint facility.

Griffin, Woods and Orr elementary schools would all be modeled after the current Jack Elementary, which has an 800-student capacity.

Clarkston would be built to the 600-student model and would have a different design because of the layout of the land.

Jones would be built at a 500-student model, which would provide more space for the future or for more magnet program options, Reid said.

St. Louis would be a center within the Jones campus and would still provide all the same services as well as opportunities for the special needs and non-special needs populations to interact. The current St. Louis School would remain but likely become a Head Start/Pre-K center with some minor modifications.

To come up with the Phase 2 list, a reassessment of the conditions of facilities was also conducted.

"The Facilities Condition Index (FCI) dictated that these six buildings (proposed in Phase 2) had the highest FCI and therefore should be prioritized first," Reid said.

The FCI measures the estimated cost of the current-year deficiencies, including recommended improvements and compares that to the replacement cost of the facility, according to TISD. The total renovation costs divided by total replacement costs equals the FCI.

The FCI essentially measures the cost of repairing a school versus replacing it. An FCI of 114.4 percent, for example, means it would cost more to remodel the school than it would to just replace it.

In 2004, for Phase 1, 70 percent was the cutoff for building a new facility versus remodeling.

The schools in Phase 2 have FCIs that range from Clarkston at 93.5 percent (the only Phase 2 school listed below 100 percent) to St. Louis at 125.5 percent.

Phase 2, according to the original master plan, would address the remaining elementary schools, through replacing or remodeling buildings. The third phase called for addressing mainly middle schools; and the fourth, high schools.

Not all the remaining elementary schools are addressed in this bond package, though.

According to estimates presented at a school board workshop in May, replacing five elementary schools would cost about $112 million and remodeling several others would be another $77 million, for a total of about $189 million.

"The total amount of money that was needed to do all 10 projects would have been somewhere close to $190 million," Reid said. "We just believe that's too much to ask the taxpayers to consider at this point."

The Phase 2 proposal is "doing slightly less work than what was done in 2004, but obviously for about $30 million more due to inflationary issues," he said.

Reid said that $189 million figure would have been in 2009 dollars.

"So, we wouldn't have been able to accomplish that much work in the same time period, so it probably would have grown beyond that," he said, noting it gets into a window where "it's harder to predict what your inflationary costs are."

But with the $125 million proposal, "We're trying to get authorized the amount of work we can get accomplished now, and as we move beyond this one and into future bond issues, we'll try to do the same thing.

"We'll try to only authorize that amount of work that we know we can accomplish in a given period of time so we can set a true dollar figure," Reid said.

Board President Ron Vickery said in August that while he wished they could finish all the elementary schools, "I just felt like that total price tag was going to be more than our community was probably willing to accept right now."

"This (proposal) addresses the most significant of the remaining elementary schools -- and I love the fact that we're adding the St. Louis component because that community of families and teachers and staff at that school and the children that are served there really deserve to have a new facility to address their needs," Vickery said.

Vickery emphasized recently that the reason the 2008 proposal is more than the 2004 bond issue is mainly because of inflation.

"The inflation in the construction industry is rising at a rate of about 10 to 12 percent per year," he said. "Waiting four years between the first phase and this phase has really caused us to need more money to do the same amount of work, actually one school less. I hope the public understands that."

He said he also hopes the public understands that if this proposal is successful, the district does not intend to wait four more years for Phase 3.

"We'll probably come back in about 18 months to 24 months so we can try to get ahead of this inflation that's eating at us right now pretty badly," he said.