The Plain Dealer9/30/07

Joseph L. Wagner

Plain Dealer Reporter

Cleveland school officials want voters to approve a $217 million bond issue to complete the district’s construction program, saying they don’t have enough money to cover 26 schools in the final segments of the project.

In a meeting with Plain Dealer reporters and editors, school officials said that the five-year-old construction project will exhaust its $1 billion budget in 2012 and that at least $500 million more will be needed to finish it. The bond issue – which would be the second voter-approved loan for the project – would leverage $300 million in state aid to fill the gap.

“We’re trying to keep, as much as possible, neighborhood schools,” Eugene Sanders, the district’s chief executive, said last week. “We are pleased that there will be no immediate closings for several years for any of our schools.”

However, Sanders said some schools must increase enrollment to survive. In the meantime, they will just be maintained rather than renovated or rebuilt.

Sanders emphasized his plan is a draft, and he invited public comment.

Mayor Frank Jackson called the plan “thorough and practical” but did not directly say he would endorse the bond issue. “I have posed specific questions to him surrounding the facilities master plan and bond issuance,” Jackson said through a spokeswoman. He did not elaborate.

Robert Heard, Board of Education president, said that Sanders’ plan looks good at first glance but that the board has not decided when it would send the measure to the ballot.

Sanders said he will try to sell the bond issue as a “no new taxes” measure because it would not raise the 3.7-mill rate already approved for construction.

However, the plan would add nine years of debt to the current 28-year bond issue. That would cost the owner of a $100,000 home just over $1,000 for the extra period.

Sanders’ plan focuses on building more but smaller elementary schools at the expense of high schools, most of which have been moved to the latter years — and most unpredictable part — of the plan. Among the goals: pre-kindergarten space in every elementary school and at least one auditorium in each “academic neighborhood.”

The Sanders administration is confident voters will understand the district’s predicament and approve the new money because it would generate hundreds of millions of dollars in additional state aid.

“How do you walk away from that $300 million?” said Gary Sautter, deputy chief of capital projects.

Sanders’ problem is that the original budget — $335 million in a bond issue and $670 million from the state — was insufficient from the start to pay the estimated $1.5 billion cost of renovating or rebuilding 111 schools.

After factoring in inflation, “the shortage then was actually $900 million,” said Dan Burns, the district’s chief operating officer.

Former CEO Barbara Byrd Bennett has said she was aware of the need for extra cash but wanted to see if slumping enrollment would eliminate the need for improvements to all the buildings.

In 2002, the district had 73,000 students; this year, it has 50,000, with the state predicting the loss of 10,000 more by 2015. Sanders said competition from voucher and charter schools, as well as the overall decline in city population, is behind the decrease.

Sanders is convinced that he can reverse the enrollment free fall by building new elementary schools, offering more choices like single-gender schools and marketing the district more effectively.

An increase at the elementary level would eventually drive up enrollment at the high schools, Sanders and Burns said.

Sanders’ new proposal, which must be approved by the school board and the state, is expected to draw opposition from City Council members whose constituents were promised new or renovated schools in the original plan.

Some West Side parents say their schools will continue to be overcrowded because Sanders has decided to eliminate an additional “relief” high school.

The district will raze the Cleveland School of Arts, now for grades six through 12, and build a new school for kindergarten through high school. Preservationists have been concerned about losing what they say is the art school’s unique architecture. The new plan will also eliminate the Dike Campus in the Hough area, which prepares younger students for the arts school.

There are winners in the revised plan. Some schools originally slated for renovation would be built new instead. One of those is Max Hayes vocational high school, though its location is likely to change. Hayes also may be among the first of the district’s “green” buildings.

“We’re looking at geothermal heating and cooling, solar power and water recycling,” Burns said.

Sanders, who has been under pressure from the Cleveland teachers union to seek a property tax increase for operating expenses, said he is focusing on the construction issue now.

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