Greenwood, Loyal boards vote to move forward with feasibility study

By Valorie Brecht The Greenwood and Loyal school boards have decided to move forward with a consolidation financial feasibility study to gain an understanding of how combining the two school districts would impact the schools’ mill rate and overall financial situation. The study will be done by Robert W. Baird and Company, will take eight to 12 weeks and will cost each school district $6,000.

The boards met jointly on Sunday evening at Loyal to discuss the topic.

“We did talk about it in our last meeting, but the board did not approve it,” said Greenwood District Administrator Joe Green. “In my opinion, the communities have given us the guidance to move forward with consolidation. Now it’s the boards’ job to figure out what that means.”

The community input Green was referring to was a survey sent out by both school districts asking respondents if they would support the consolidation of the two school districts. Greenwood had 215 responses, with 70%in favor of consolidation; and Loyal had 350 responses, with 75% in favor of consolidation.

Greenwood School Board member Eliza Ruzic brought up a constituent concern.

“My question is, is there no value to the last feasibility study we did?” she asked. “I’ve talked to a lot of people and a lot of the feedback I’ve gotten is, do we really need to spend the money on it again?”

However, Loyal District Administrator Chris Lindner said the last feasibility study was done leading up to the consolidation vote in 2007, so the numbers would have significantly changed by now.

“Being that it’s close to 20 years later, a lot of things have changed. I think it’s a good idea to do fiscal and facilities studies,” he said.

“I talked to Baird, and they suggested redoing the study because we are in a vastly different scenario than we were in 20 years ago,” added Green.

Loyal board member Derek Weyer asked if there would be opportunities for the public to be involved in the process. Chris Lindner said that the eight-to-12-week study was supposed to the best for “process continuation and community engagement,” according to Baird. He also said Baird had been good about visiting the school and presenting information whenever he had asked for it in the past.

He also said while Baird could do the financial feasibility study, the districts would need to hire a different company for a facilities study. Miron Construction did a facilities study for Loyal “five or six years ago” which cost the district $10,000. However, Chris Lindner did not have a cost for a joint facilities study.

“I would wait on the facility study and see how the fiscal study comes back first,” said Loyal board member Dave Clintsman.

“It would be smart to get bids from construction companies in the meantime,” said fellow board member Holly Lindner.

After about 10 minutes of discussion, Greenwood board member Jerome Krempasky made a motion to approve the financial feasibility study for $6,000 per school district. However, the motion died for lack of a second. Then on the Loyal side, Clintsman made a motion, seconded by Holly Lindner, to do the financial feasibility study.

“Can I ask why you guys are not interested in the study now?” Weyer asked the Greenwood board.

“It’s not that I’m not interested. I wanted you guys to

Please see Feasibility Study, page 5 Feasibility study,

from p. 4 go first. Just being honest,” said Ruzic.

With that, the Loyal board voted unanimously to approve the financial feasibility study. After that, Ruzic made a motion, seconded by Krempasky, approve it on Greenwood’s side. That also passed unanimously.

Both boards also approved the superintendents of both districts to put together a request for proposal to get estimates on a facilities feasibility study, which would explore options for consolidation, whether it was putting the high school in one community or the other, or building a new high school, and what option would make the most sense given the existing facilities.

Staff sharing The boards also talked briefly about a shared staffing philosophy. The school districts have already combined for marching band, one-act and three act play, multiple sports and courses like college English and CAD (computer-aided design).

“If we are sharing positions and sharing classrooms, do we allow staff to have any say if they don’t want to travel to this room or work with this certain group of kids?” said Green.

He wanted an idea of the board’s opinion on the matter.

“I think we make the decision as a board to leave it to the administrators to say, ‘Hey, we are going to put these classes together or share these classes.’ If it’s teaching a class and the teacher doesn’t like it, that’s too bad. I guess in my opinion, this is what the job is and if you can’t do the job, that’s tough. We’ll find somebody else. I feel the same way on coaching,” said Loyal School Board president Dennis Roehl.

“I think it comes back to doing what’s best for the kids,” agreed Greenwood School Board president Jamie Gardner.

“I do think it’s important to keep teachers involved in the process early. But once they’ve agreed to it, I don’t think it’s OK for them to back out,” said Ruzic.

Krempasky agreed that the school districts should continue to share as much as they could, because the focus was giving more opportunities to the kids.

“At the last school board meeting, we had a girl who wanted to take AP statistics. We had only one student, so we couldn’t offer it, but maybe Loyal would have had it,” he said.

The boards also emphasized the need for communication early and often with the teachers to make the process of sharing classes go smoothly.

“I would sure hope as administration you wouldn’t just come up to a teacher and say, ‘This is what you’re going to do.’ There would be plenty of conversations and brainstorming prior to that decision,” said Weyer.

After the conversation, Roehl thanked the Greenwood board for coming and working with Loyal.

The next joint meeting date has not been set.