ELLIJAY, Ga. – At least one Gilmer County resident is expressing concern after school system officials closed an elementary school and subsequently bought an office building.
“I’ve never seen a school closed that quickly,” resident Jolene DePlancke said. “It’s just not the way to handle it. They really didn’t take into account the children or the teachers or the public opinion.”
Oakland Elementary – one of four elementary schools in the Gilmer system and the only one outside Ellijay – was closed for the 2011-12 school year because of a system budget deficit of $8 million. The closing saved the system about $2 million without cutting into services, officials said.
“We had a little over 700 empty seats in our schools in town,” Gilmer County Schools Superintendent Bryan Dorsey said. “We had about 270 kids at Oakland Elementary that could easily be absorbed [into those schools].”
The schools budget has fallen by 30 percent over the last two years, and the system began making cuts in January, Dorsey said.
“It’s just tough times for everybody everywhere right now,” he said.
DePlancke said she disagreed with the school board’s decision to close the school.
“I cannot see how closing a neighborhood elementary school was cost justified,” she said. “They haven’t proved to me that they’ve really saved any money.”
Several months after announcing Oakland would be closed, the Gilmer County Board of Education bought an old bank building for use by the school system’s central office.
Dorsey said it was unfortunate the purchase of the new building with special purpose local option sales tax money coincided with the budget cuts. He said many people do not understand that SPLOST funds can be used only for capital improvements, such as building purchases, and are not connected to the budget.
“I think the timing has people confused,” Dorsey said. “I think it’s the complexities of how schools are financed and how things are categorized.”
Dorsey said the building appealed to the board because of its central location and its reduced price – 30 cents on the dollar of the property’s appraised value.
He said the current 6,000-square-foot central office building is unsuitable for the system’s needs.
“It’s actually an unsafe environment,” he said. “We have furniture in the hallways, we have business equipment in the hallways – we just have a lot of infrastructure issues with the building. … We have over $100,000 of equipment housed in the basement.”
Dorsey said the building is “just not a good environment for today’s demands and needs for a technology and administrative office.”
He said the new building will have about 12,000 square feet and cost the county about $670,000.
DePlancke said she understood the central office needed more space but did not understand why the bank building was chosen.
“I can’t see why they couldn’t add onto the current building,” she said. “They could have built a building that would have been perfect and to our exact specifications for significantly less.”
The empty elementary school building also could house the central office, DePlancke said.
Though the bank building needs some renovations, Dorsey said renovating the current building or building a new one would be more costly.
“What we want is to have a facility that should last the school system for a time to come,” he said. “I would commend our board for looking at the long-term future of our school.”
Rachel Bunn is based in Ellijay. Contact her at rnbunn@gmail.com.