Selling of schools should boost C-M and community
When about half of Canon-McMillan’s elementary students return to classrooms Aug. 28, they will do so in a glistening new building. But the youngsters, teachers and administrators there won’t be the only beneficiaries of change within the district. Canon-Mac is poised to sell two shuttered schools for a combined $1.1 million.
Potential buyers emerged with offers, and the school board voted 9-0 recently to authorize the sales of First Street Elementary for $600,000 and Cecil Elementary for $525,000. Canon-McMillan closed those buildings, along with Muse Elementary, at the end of the 2016-2017 term. All are aging structures, a collective 255 years old.
The district planned to sell First Street (built in 1924) and Cecil (1936) and raze Muse (1936), then convert the Muse site into a parking lot for the elementary building to be erected nearby. Students, and a number of educators, from those schools would transition to new Muse Elementary.
Canon-McMillan is succeeding on all of those projections: the sales are expected be completed soon, old Muse Elementary is gone and its successor is on course to open on time.
The buyers, Canon-Mac officials told the Observer-Reporter’s Gideon Bradshaw, intend to redevelop the former schools into housing for seniors. Benjamin and Iryna Katsevich were listed as the bidders on the Cecil school, the Miller-Valentine Group for First Street.
These pending sales are an apparent boost for the district, where there not only were early concerns about whether deals actually could be consummated, but also whether the bids would be worthwhile.
But during a meeting the week before the board voted on those offers, two district officials expressed optimism about those prospects. School director Darla Bowman-Monaco said Canon-McMillan “should be grateful” it found buyers, and solicitor Jocelyn Kramer said she believed the bids were higher than the appraised values of the old schools. Kramer also told the board, “in some cases, the only way we can sell the land was to demolish the building, so I think you guys did really, really well here.”
Running a school district is an expensive endeavor nowadays, with pension funding, escalating health-care costs and other necessary expenditures ramping up budgets. Building a new school, at an estimated cost of $31 million – as Canon-McMillan is doing – isn’t cheap either. The district, like many in the area, had to raise taxes for the next academic year, although it was a modest 0.2-mill hike to 11.09.
Canon-McMillan showed fiscal sense by consolidating three aging schools into a new one, reducing its elementary lineup from seven buildings to five. Now it stands to make more than $1 million from selling Cecil and First Street. That prospect would benefit the community as well, eliminating the possibility of two large structures sitting idle while eventually providing residences for seniors.
The deals still have to be finalized, but they look promising.