CMS Spending Millions On New Office Space
CMS, however, will eventually have to abandon its main headquarters, which was bartered to the county as part of a complicated land swap to locate a minor league baseball stadium in uptown. As part of the same deal, CMS received a $1-a-year, 20-year lease for administrative office space in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Government Center. About 50 employees, including members of Gorman’s executive staff, their administrative assistants and executive coordinators, recently made the move to their new Government Center offices.
With several under-capacity and under-utilized schools across the district, however, critics of CMS swapping $3 million in prime real estate for new offices wonder why administrators couldn’t make do with available classroom space.
“They don’t need an ivory tower to do their work,” said school board member Kaye McGarry. “If an office in a school is good enough for a principal, I don’t see why it shouldn’t be good enough for an administrative assistant or executive director or area superintendent.”
CMS currently has six learning community area offices – essentially administrative outposts – in different geographic zones of the county, along with a so-called Achievement Zone run out of the uptown Education Center.
Gorman’s budget calls for eliminating the Achievement Zone and grouping all of the district’s Title I schools under a new Central Zone, which would be run out of Education Center. Under the plan, the number of remaining area offices would shrink to five. The Southeast learning community would merge with the West and the Northeast office would move to Longcreek Elementary.
McGarry, along with school board members Richard McElrath and Joyce Waddell, were recently on the losing end of a vote calling for Gorman to close all of the learning community offices, a move that could have saved CMS close to $4 million. Those resources, the trio argued, could better be used to save teacher positions.
While other school board members and CMS top staffers have argued that the learning community offices provide vital administrative support to the schools they serve, another reason against shuttering the outposts seems just as likely: CMS is trapped in long-term leases for the spaces that would cost the district nearly $1 million to break.
There are 23 months remaining, for example, on the building that houses the Central learning community office, at a cost of $280,000. The North, East and South learning communities also have 23 months remaining on their leases at a cost of, respectively, $240,000, $203,000 and $178,000. CMS, Raible said, is currently trying to sublease some of the facilities.
“It’s just ridiculous that were spending that kind of money for administration and offices,” McGarry said, “when were laying off hundreds of teachers and teacher assistants.”
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