By James Hanlon
Leader Staff Writer
During the Aug. 10 Oxford School Board meeting, Assistant Superintendent of Business and Operations Sam Barna gave an update on the district’s new property at 775 W. Drahner Rd. The district bought the 32-acre property from the Dominican Sisters for $2.5 million in June.
“What a tremendous opportunity it was to purchase this property along, specifically, with the main building at such an incredible price,” Barna said. Built in 1997, the 57,000 square-foot main building in the rear of the property “is in great shape” and only needs minor updating.
He estimates if the district were to build something like the main building today at the current cost of construction for educational use at about $300 a square-foot, it would cost $18 million just for the building alone.
The district has identified five “program needs” that could occupy the main building: district administration, Oxford Bridges High School, Oxford Early Learning Center, LOFT and Oxford Virtual Academy (OVA). “I say ‘needs’ very loosely. You know, just brainstorming as an administrative group, talking with other individuals in the district. Basically, we see some programs that could potentially go into the main building.”
Board President Tom Donnelly said those five programs “are all things that are bottlenecked today or we’re paying rent for today that we can potentially see bringing into this space, expanding, have a home base and not pay rent. . .”
Barna calculated a possible square-footage allocation by increasing the footage each program currently uses by 15 percent. About 66 percent of the available square-footage in the main building would be used for curriculum – that is, for students. Only a third of it would be for administrative offices. “Again, nothing set in stone. Just thought-provoking and wanting to get discussion started,” he said.
The main point of Barna’s presentation was to provide a “preliminary development project timeline” giving an idea of what work still needs to be done before various school programing can move in. The timeline is broken into three overlapping phases extending through August 2024.
Phase 1 entails bringing the main house in compliance with state regulations, safety updates and technology infrastructure. This is the shortest phase and is expected to finish by March 2022.
Some of the tasks are already underway. New network fiber the board authorized at the July meeting is almost installed. Switches and other network equipment should be in by mid-September. The biggest task will be to switch the water supply from a well to the township water system. The property zoning will need to be changed to educational and business use. And various safety tests and inspections are needed.
Barna said all the technology updates would cost about $125,000. He gave a total preliminary cost estimate for Phase 1 at $290,000. “Obviously, very high-level. The reason why it’s high-level is we’re just digging in to some of the things we think we know how much they may cost, but we’re not quite certain, such as bringing the main building to domestic water.”
Phase 2 is the transition of select departments, staffing and furniture from existing spaces into select areas of main building. This phase overlaps with Phase 1, beginning as soon as November of this year, extending until December 2022.
Other tasks in this phase include obtaining state approval for classifying the main building as a school building, and continuing to evaluate possible uses of the buildings on campus.
Besides the main building, the property also has a maintenance building, three residential homes and the retreat house at the front of the property. According to the property assessment, the retreat house is in poor condition, requiring several million dollars of renovation to bring it up to code. The building also has “a relatively inefficient layout as it stands right now,” Barna said.
During Phase 1 and Phase 2, “internal stakeholders” including district administration, department heads and staff will determine “what we feel would be the best method of use for that building, if there is going to be a long-term use for that building. There’s a potential the answer could be that the best use may be to eventually bulldoze that down. We’re not there yet, but there’s a possibility.”
Discussions with the bond and sinking fund planning committee must also begin. So far, the dollars used on the new property are not bonded. They are from the general fund. So, if the district decides to do something major with the retreat house, or construct a new building on the property, they will need to discuss bonding or sinking fund options. These discussions will continue in Phase 3.
The general costs of Phase 2 have not been determined. “We’re not there yet,” Barna said. “It really all depends on what we ultimately chose. What (buildings) we chose to keep, what we chose to eventually demolish, and what programs are where and when.”
Phase 3 is the transition of the remaining departments, staffing and furniture from existing spaces into select areas of main building. This phase begins in March 2022, overlapping with Phase 2, and extends through August 2024.
A priority of this phase is transitioning OVA to the main building by summer 2024 when OVA’s lease in Oxford Marketplace expires. “OVA has seen such enormous growth and we’ve done so well,” Barna said. “But you know we lease the space and the district spends currently, just on lease payments, approximately $165,000 a year. We have about 34 months left on the lease, so we have to start looking at transitioning those spaces to the main house or elsewhere on the property.”
The other major task will be to finalize decisions of site and future programming needs and prepare a bond/sinking fund proposal, if needed.
Trustee Dan D’Alessandro asked Supt. Tim Throne how soon the main building could be ready for students.
“I don’t know if I’d want to throw that out there,” Throne responded. “My hope would be maybe even sometime this school year, but in order to allow students to go into that building and start using it as a school, you have to submit your building plans, a whole bunch of plans, all the way to the state, wait for them to get approved, come back down, all that kind of stuff, so it takes quite a bit of time to do that. . . My gut and heart is, yeah, as soon as possible. But in reality, do I think that we could have students in there this year? I don’t know, probably not.”