Volusia County school district officials sat in front of the School Board Tuesday evening with a question now nearly age-old: How will the district tackle a backlog of infrastructure projects, some that needed attention as long as a decade ago?
The district had to abandon a mass of projects in 2008 with the onset of the Great Recession, said Saralee Morrissey, director of planning, pointing to a number of heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems within schools that are sorely in need of repairs or replacements.
"We've had almost 10 years of not being able to bring forward projects that we know were needed," Morrissey said.
But the district can't wait much longer as temporary fixes in many instances no longer hold up, including at Atlantic High, where the chiller gave out as the district was readying to replace it.
"A Band-Aid no longer works," said Superintendent Tom Russell.
District officials led a workshop ahead of Tuesday's board meeting at which they briefed board members on pending legislation, construction projects and financial considerations that will all likely affect the budget for next year.
It's too early to nail down a specific budget projection right now -- the current year's operating budget totals $847 million -- but district officials anticipate they'll have a better idea of budget figures next month after the close of the legislative session.
Among the decisions the board will face: how to tee up finances to cover critical capital projects. The district bonded $40 million for the current fiscal year so that it could more quickly jump into capital projects covered by the voter-approved, 15-year extension to the half-cent sales tax. Originally, district officials projected they would need to bond another $100 million for the next fiscal year to cover projects like the construction of Pierson Elementary School and the replacement of Chisholm Elementary. That figure has ballooned to somewhere between $135 million and $150 million with cost increases and the need to reprioritize projects.
The district can't ramp up its capital projects too much "without bonding more," Morrissey said.
While a key challenge remains putting the right people in place to see capital projects through, officials said the district will have to bond more if it wants to accomplish the projects it had planned.
The need to bond more funds comes at a time when the half-cent sales tax has collected more than the district's initial estimations of $32 million per year. In the next five years, district officials expect it will generate about $40 million per year.
But since the district receives those revenues in monthly installments rather than all at once, it needs more money up front to move ahead with projects.
"With the pressure we're receiving to push some of the big projects up, it will take us too long to collect some of that money to satisfy what the desire is," said Russ Tysinger, the district's director of maintenance and operations.
School Board Vice Chairwoman Linda Cuthbert said she can see waiting to bond more funds but asked district officials if the district could ease up on transferring funds from the capital fund to the general fund in order to preserve more funds for capital needs. The district has routinely routed dollars from its capital fund to its general fund in support of maintenance and repair projects but has had a plan in place to decrease the amount of funding it transfers.
"It's always a balancing act between the two budgets," Tysinger said, noting that the district has to find a way to recoup dollars for whichever fund lost them.
In other news, the board adopted the district's 2018-19 academic calendar in which Thanksgiving will be a week long, with two built-in makeup days, and spring break will be moved a week later to avoid coinciding with Bike Week.
