Central Greene scuttles motion to begin consolidation planning
WAYNESBURG – Central Greene School Board scuttled a motion to hire an architect to come up with a building consolidation plan for its aging middle school.
Board member Sarah Hughes made the motion Thursday night to hire Core Architects to develop and implement a building consolidation plan. However, the motion died for lack of a second.
Neither Hughes nor school board President Andrew Corfont returned phone calls seeking comment on why the motion failed or what will happen to the consolidation plan.
“I was surprised when the motion failed,” Superintendent Brian Uplinger said. “I thought we were ready to move forward.”
He said the district administrators reviewed multiple architect firms before recommending Core Architects to the school board.
Uplinger said the district wants to move the middle school students from Margaret Bell Miller Middle School to the high school and elementary campus. He said he anticipated it would be a two- to three-year project that would, over time, save the district money.
One reason for the move, Uplinger said, is the state of Margaret Bell Miller, which was built in 1928.
“There are things our maintenance guys can no longer fix because it is so old,” he said.
The other reason is declining in enrollment. Uplinger said since 2007, the district has been losing an average of 30 students a year throughout the schools.
“It’s not just Central Greene, but all the districts,” he said. “People are leaving and finding jobs elsewhere.”
Uplinger said the plan is to “build within the walls of the already existing buildings.”
But that wasn’t the plan two years ago, when the district purchased 17 acres of land near its football stadium, where district officials considered building a new middle school. During a November 2015 meeting, the board agreed to purchase the mostly wooded property for $550,000.
Uplinger said since the motion to hire an architect failed, the board will continue to discuss the possibility of consolidating schools during its building and grounds committee meetings, which are open to the public, but are not advertised and do not have a set schedule.