The majority of Sunflower County residents polled last fall on local school facilities would support a future bond referendum, but that support might depend on the project.
A countywide assessment conducted by Brown & Associates sought citizens’ input on four main questions concerning the county’s two high schools.
Now that the survey is complete, the results are in the hands of the Sunflower County Consolidated School District, which shared them with The Entperise-Tocsin recently.
Nearly 30 percent of those polled said they did not support the notion of one centrally located high school.
More than 42 percent were for constructing two new schools, one on the north end and one on the south end.
Seventy-eight percent of those polled said they would support future school facilities’ bond referendums.
In addition, out of the 959 qualified responses, 408 or nearly 43.9 percent strongly agreed that the district should work to improve the school that is in the worst condition.
What happens now?
SCCSD Board President Edward Thomas and Superintendent Miskia Davis said the community survey, which included a facilities audit is still being assessed.
Davis said the next steps have not yet been determined.
“However, we are making improvements to all of our existing facilities while we determine next steps,” she said.
Thomas added that they did briefly review the findings during a recent work session but they, “haven’t gotten to the depths of it yet.”
Thomas did say, however, that based on the 900 plus persons who responded to the survey, they apparently would support a bond issue.
He called that a “main ingredient” although the question of one new high school or two is still a looming issue.
“That’s something we haven’t discussed yet,” Thomas said.
Davis upheld that the report. “(It) Really just confirmed what the Board and I had suspected, and that was that each end really wants a new facility in their community,” she said. “That was not only expected, it is understandable. It makes it difficult because we obviously cannot afford to build two new facilities, but the report allowed us to have the pulse of the people in black and white.”
In the fall of 2017, Brown & Associates was retained by the SCCSD to initiate and implement a survey engaging the community in discussions centered on the public school facilities within the county. Another aim of the project was to conduct a facilities audit to determine the current condition of the district’s active schools.
A third component of the assessment was a collection of district-derived questions that were intended to give them feedback from the county residents that would ascertain whether they were willing to support new high school construction and to what degree.
Brown & Associates conducted the study in various locations across the county from Sept. 15 to Nov. 15 and had until Dec. 15 to submit the results. Nine hundred and ninety-two persons completed the questionnaire but 33 were not counted because they came from zip codes outside of Sunflower County.
Using a facility condition index method, Brown & Associates determined that by combining the current needs with the next five years of anticipated life cycle renewal forecasts, the district would need approximately $36 million in facility-related improvements.
Those figures do not include any classroom additions or new construction for additional enrollment growth or program expansion. Furthermore, the audit revealed that all facility renewal deficiencies have exceeded the 5-year life cycle renewal, and require improvement before additional damage and failures occur.
The report states that it can be surmised that a combination of aged facilities and a lack of preventative maintenance over time on key building components has greatly diminished the extendable life of the facilities. It also discovered that many facilities’ preventative maintenance tasks have gone unaddressed over time and have escalated into priority items due to common maintenance oversight.
Although some deficiencies have been addressed, the document further states that poor construction methods were utilized in those efforts and that has created reoccurring or new problems.
Brown & Associates determined that more than 80 percent of the total repairs, including life cycle renewals, are in dire need of attention. And it cautions that failure to address these issues timely will result in further degradation which may cause system failures and or magnified health and safety issues that could result in major local and state code violations.
The group made recommendations to the SCCSD that it felt should be immediately addressed including, evaluating the current maintenance staff’s skill level, efficiency, and competency to ensure that they are capable of conducting the preventative maintenance repairs on the facility life cycle renewal insufficiencies regularly.
Brown & Associates also advocated addressing personnel shortages and maintenance skill level deficiencies with proper manpower allocation for each facility in the district, prioritizing facility deficiencies in the order of importance namely, deferred maintenance, code compliance, ADA compliance, capital renewal, functional deficiencies and hazardous material.
In their opinion, the district should also be implementing a short-term plan to address the prioritized deficiencies to prevent further degradation and failure of systems plus developing a long-term plan to address the facilities within the district to include, the repair of all major building components and systems that have exceeded their life expectancy.
Closing or re-purposing certain facilities due to age or underutilization, and the construction of new facilities to replace those that have exceeded their life expectancy was also recommended.
