Photo: Archuleta School District (ASD) Superintendent Rick Holt, giving an introductory presentation at Pagosa Springs Elementary School concerning the future of the District’s facilities.
The gym at the Pagosa Springs Elementary School was set up last night, November 14, with chairs for about 50 people, and about 35 people showed up… to hear Archuleta School District (ASD) Superintendent Rick Holt and ASD Chief Executive of Operations Josh Sanchez introduce a big question.
There’s a fork in the road, regarding school buildings. Shall we take the right fork? Or the left fork?
Given that school buildings always require ongoing maintenance, and given that the maintenance generally gets more expensive as the buildings get older…
…And given that an obvious option to maintaining older school buildings is to sell them, or tear them down, and build brand new buildings that need less maintenance and might also be better suited to “21st Century” educational practices… such as robots who act as teachers…
… Which path would the taxpayers prefer to take? Assuming that the taxpayers, in fact, want to address Pagosa’s school buildings in one way or the other… with higher taxes…
I’m just kidding about the robots acting as teachers. That idea did not come up at last night’s presentation and public discussion. (Although it may be a reality someday.)
But I’m not kidding about the higher taxes.
I’ve been to this rodeo before. In 2011, ASD asked the voters to approve a bond issue of up to $98 million, to build a new K-8 “mega-campus”… and the voters rejected the bond measure by a 3-to-1 margin.
Then in 2017, ASD convened a work group of local citizens to consider another run at the “mega-campus”, and after a year of meetings, the work group recommended the District not to move forward with the bond election.
Each time, the process has been slightly different, but the answer to the question of “better maintenance vs. new buildings” has been assumed to be “new buildings”. After all, the high-maintenance buildings — the Elementary School, and the two buildings at the Middle School — are all more than 50 years old.
On a personal note, I currently live in one of the oldest continuously-occupied homes in Pagosa Springs… 124 years old and still going strong.
But that’s nothing compared to the oldest continuously-occupied homes in the U.S. For example, some of the homes in Taos Pueblo, still in use, were reportedly built prior to 1450 AD. Some may have been built as early as 1000 AD.
Apparently, the Taos people figured out this whole “how to maintain old buildings” trick a long time ago.
Be that as it may, Superintendent Holt and Chief Executive of Operations Sanchez seemed to be suggesting, on Thursday evening, that our local school buildings were reaching — or had already reached — the end of their useful lives. And they made somewhat compelling arguments. Some of the classrooms, for example, are inside the buildings without any windows or access to fresh air. The 7th & 8th Grade Middle School building, in particular, has a couple of failing sewer lines, the repair of which will require digging into a concrete floor.
Thankfully, the District plans to actually repairs those failing lines.
Mr. Sanchez noted that the District has spent about $4.6 million on repairs over the past six years He didn’t, however, offer any price estimate for the future repairs that might be needed over the next decade or two. He also didn’t explain how many of those repairs were funded by federal COVID money… or by the Mill Levy Override (MLO) approved by voters in 2018, which generated about $1.5 million a year in a additional funding for the District.
The presentation shared a number of interesting facts, but not the most important information that the voters will eventually want to know.
Namely:
1. Over the next 20 years, if ASD makes all the repairs and upgrades currently identified for our existing school buildings, what might that cost the taxpayers?
2. Over the next 20 years, if ASD builds brand new buildings, what might that cost the taxpayers?
Disclosure: I currently serve as a volunteer member of the Pagosa Peak Open School (PPOS) board of directors, and PPOS could conceivably benefit from a future bond issue approved by local voters. This editorial reflects only my own opinions and observations, and not necessarily the opinions of the PPOS board or staff.
When Mr. Holt opened the floor to questions, one person asked if the District had a growing enrollment and needed larger buildings. Mr. Holt answered, no, but we don’t know what the future holds.
One of the comments made by an audience member concerned the recent November 5 election, where about 58% of Archuleta County voters voted ‘Yes’ on Amendment 80 — “Constitutional Right to School Choice” — an amendment that might have eventually authorized the use of tax-funded school vouchers to pay for private school education. That Amendment was rejected statewide, but was favored by most Archuleta County taxpayers. (The audience member mistakenly claimed that 80% of Archuleta County voters had supported Amendment 80.)
Did that particular vote reflect how Archuleta County voters feel about local public education? I would have to say, no. Local voters twice approved ASD’s Mill Levy Override tax increase, in 2018 and in 2023, by sizable margins.
Does that mean they will support new multi-million-dollar school buildings? We have to wonder. The MLO currently amounts to about $1.7 million per year, but new buildings might be in the $100 million range, at the rate inflation is going.
So we can understand, if ASD might not want to talk about dollar figures just yet.
In the end, this whole thing is partly a trust issue. Does the community trust ASD to be honest and forthright with its information about its facilities? That wasn’t the case in 2011, when a similar “we need new buildings” concept was placed before the voters. Back then, it was difficult to get clear information from the District, but easy to get misinformation.
The outcome was the overwhelming defeat of the bond measure.
ASD is at the beginning stages of presenting to, and hearing from the community. To that end, ASD has designed a Survey Monkey survey to purportedly hear from the community about school facilities.
Since we’re talking about trust, let’s take a look at the survey, from that perspective.