Pricey Office Space Trumps School Classrooms
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools officials contend that their plans to close eight schools, consolidate three others and relocate three more is part and parcel of a desperate scramble to prepare for next year’s looming budget crisis, when the state is already directing local school districts to prepare for budget cuts of 5, 10 or 15 percent, an amount that translates to a potential loss of funding between $30 million and $90 million.
The plan for school closings and consolidations is projected to save about $3.3 million in its first year and $6.2 million in its second, CMS staff revealed yesterday, and the shake-up is almost certain to lead to additional teacher layoffs.
“We don’t have any other area to cut anymore,” said $300,000-a-year Superintendent Peter Gorman. “We’ve cut all the other stuff.”
Which must surely explain why, even as it prepares to send CMS into tumult with school closings and other mass upheaval, officials have bartered away prime uptown real estate worth millions of dollars to pay for – wait for it – fancy new office space for boatloads of bureaucrats.
Yes, CMS is so stone-broke that earlier this year officials agreed to swap 2.3 acres of land near Ray’s Splash Planet, worth nearly $3 million, to secure administrative office space as part of a mixed-use development planned in uptown’s Third Ward.
The district could have sold the uptown property and used the proceeds to either pay down capital debt or address other capital needs. Instead, while closing and consolidating schools to ostensibly save money to prep for next year’s budget crunch, CMS officials moved forward with the swap that will net about 25,000 square feet of office space.
And as we reflect on the district closing schools because there’s simply nowhere else to cut to save money, let’s recall that CMS still has its mini-fiefdom of district offices – the vaunted learning community outposts – that some school board members contend are costing the district upwards of $4 million to keep up and running and staffed with yet more bureaucrats.
Meanwhile, school board members yesterday passed on removing any of the school closings and other plans for change, and instead threw yet another school, Lincoln Heights Elementary, into the mothball mix and added another, Bruns Avenue, to the list of facilities that would serve a student population of Pre-K through eighth grade. Morgan School, which serves an exceptional children population, was proposed to be moved to the site of Oakhurst Elementary, which would see its students scattered to other locations.
CMS plans a slate of community forums where the public can weigh in on the proposals, before the school board votes in early November on the plans.
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