ALEXANDRIA – Celisa Rambo, library paraprofessional at Alexandria-Monroe Jr.-Sr. High School got tired of looking at the stuffing push its way through a slash in the yellow upholstery of a chair.
“These kids’ parents had this furniture,” she said.
So this school year, Rambo, who has worked at the school for nine years, decided to do something about it, reupholstering the chairs in burgundy between classes. She still has two more to do.
But Alexandria Community Schools officials don’t want staff to have to go to the lengths Rambo did to spruce up facilities and equipment.
That’s why on May 8, they plan to ask the community to chip in $19 million through a bond referendum.
“Nineteen million dollars won’t cover everything, but it will get us a good start,” said Alexandria’s superintendent Dr. Melissa Brisco.
Alexandria Community Schools will conduct a 1028 hearing, the next step toward a bond referendum, at its board of trustees meeting 7 p.m. Jan. 8.
Though the district prepared lower-cost options, officials hope residents approve a plan that would add a wing at the intermediate school to accommodate students in kindergarten through second grade. The plan also would include some renovations at the intermediate school and an auxiliary gym and additional classrooms at the high school.
District projections estimate the tax rate would be about 50 cents per $100 of assessed property value. That means a property with a value of $90,400 would have an assessed value of $26,500, putting the cost at about $11.05 per month.
The district’s tax rates are the lowest among nearby schools districts, but a successful bond referendum would put Alexandria right in the middle, officials from Umbaugh, the district’s financial adviser on the project, reported.
41 years of deterioration
A 1987 graduate, Brisco never imagined the school she loved would be in such disrepair – peeling paint, water-stained ceiling tiles and cracked terrazzo flooring — and that she would be the one charged with renovating it.
“Most of what you see is what was here then,” she said.
Of the three buildings, Brisco said, the high school takes the greatest beating.
“It’s the one in constant use all the time seven days a week, so it bears the brunt,” she said.
To make repairs just to keep the buildings in usable condition, she said, the district each year uses up its capital projects fund then dips into the general fund.
“We can’t address all those things with the referendum, but we can begin to figure out what we need to fix,” she said. “A lot of what we’ve been doing is just a Band-Aid. Again, you patch something. You really make decisions on what you can afford.”
Touring the high school, Brisco pointed to missing tiles, an out-of-order toilet stall and a broken sink. That was the “good” locker room dedicated to visiting sports teams, which Brisco and other administrators, including Principal Tom Johns, consider an embarrassment.
“Our home locker room is much worse than this,” she said. “This is 40 years of wear and tear, cleats and things of that nature.”
In the kitchen, Brisco points to the freezer.
“Earlier this week, they couldn’t even shut the freezer door,” she said.
But for the past couple of months, as Brisco has conducted focus groups on the proposed bond referendum, she has told residents if they want to really evaluate the condition of a building, just look up.
“If we don’t do this now, when are we going to do it?” she said.
“We don’t have the kinds of spaces we need for 21st-century learners,” Johns said. “We’re conditioned to just accept it.”
Choir and drama director Stephen Fleck said it’s been about a decade since the auditorium has had a sound upgrade.
“I don’t think anything has changed with the lighting system since the school was built,” he said.
Downsizing
About $11.2 million of the proposed referendum is earmarked for the construction of a kindergarten through second-grade wing at the intermediate school. That would allow the current elementary building to be closed.
“It allows us to have a great deal of cost savings in the general fund because now we’re operating two buildings instead of three. That’s how we’ll deal with our general fund issues,” Brisco said.
Still, that leaves the district with one problem officials have yet to work out: what to do with the current elementary school building.
“It is the best facility out of the three, so we need to find a use for it,” Brisco said.
She can show anyone who wants to see the problems at the high school, but it’s not so easy to tour the intermediate school.
“Most of what needs to be repaired at the intermediate school is mechanical,” she said. But it’s crucial when staff tries to fix electrical problems in standing water that causes floods after a hard rain.
Never mind the emergency exits that aren’t even part of the current plan.
“If we open them, we’ll never get them shut again,” Brisco said.
The superintendent said she is sensitive to the burden that would be placed on the taxpayers.
“Because we don’t have any debt, anything we do to raise any money is an increase,” she said. “We tried to be very conservative with the final plan. We tried to take tax impact into consideration.”
Beth Bates, president of the Alexandria Education Association, said she often attends sporting events in other districts where her children compete.
“Our facilities are deteriorating,” she said. “What are we telling people that come to visit our facilities?”