The York County School Division wants to begin the planning process for building a new elementary school, but any new construction will have to wait for the county to approve funding.
The York County School Board reviewed the superintendent’s proposed Capital Improvement Program for fiscal year 2016 at its work session Monday night. The draft also included a 10-year projection of capital projects through 2025.
The CIP is a list of major-dollar construction projects the school division plans to undertake during the next fiscal year, which will begin July 1. Capital projects in the CIP for the coming fiscal year must be approved by the York County Board of Supervisors for funding. The projects on the 10-year list are only projections and will not be considered by the Supervisors for funding this year.
For 2016, the school division is requesting $13,929,000, a large portion — $2.3 million — of which is earmarked for architectural and engineering design work for a new elementary school in the county. YCSD’s total request through fiscal year 2025 amounts to $109,629,000, with $20.7 million slated for elementary school construction in 2017.
The total amount of the 10-year projection considered by the Board of Supervisors last year was $73,649,000.
Chief Financial Officer Dennis Jarrett said the school division has been aware of the need for a new elementary school for nearly eight years but has not yet received funding for it. The number of approved and proposed residential developments in the county, including Nelson’s Grant, Yorktown Arch, Whittaker’s Mill and the expansion of the Marquis at Williamsburg are expected to add thousands of residential units within the school division and stress schools that are already at or near capacity.
YCSD leaders are particularly concerned about capacity issues at Magruder, Waller Mill, Yorktown and Grafton Bethel elementary schools.
The nearly $14 million requested for 2016 exceeds the projection presented to supervisors last December. Rather than an increase, Jarrett said the high figure was due to the school division’s renewed request for architectural and engineering work for the new elementary school, which the supervisors denied last year.
Jarrett said he could not predict whether the supervisors would approve the division’s request for funds for an elementary school, but said the status of YCSD’s debt service in the next few years suggested the division could afford the project.
The school division’s debt obligations are scheduled to drop by $2.7 million from fiscal years 2015 to 2019 when the Grafton complex and Tabb Middle construction projects will be paid off. Jarrett said that decrease would allow more leeway to take on debt to finance the construction of a new elementary school. The county would still have to come up with $3.6 million to fund the $6.3 million increase in the school division’s CIP over the same period.
“They’re going to have to dig deep,” Jarrett said.
There will be a public hearing on the proposed CIP at the school board’s Nov. 17 meeting. Board members will discuss the proposal again at their Dec. 8 meeting and are scheduled to vote on the CIP’s approval at the Dec. 15 meeting. The proposal will then move on to the Board of Supervisors for consideration.
School Board Chairman Mark Medford said he had reached out to supervisors to schedule a joint meeting between the two boards to expedite the conversation on the new elementary school.
“The last thing I want to have happen is all of a sudden, we’re getting ready to open a school year, and we have to roll in mobile classrooms. All of a sudden we’re in crisis mode,” he said.
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