Officials Tour MGCC Building

Could It Be School Option?

With the reality of a $69 million price tag for a proposed new merged elementary and middle school in Buena Vista sinking in, some in the community are looking at a much less pricey option – converting the vacated Mountain Gateway Community College’s Rockbridge Center on Vista Links Drive into a middle school.

City officials and about a dozen teachers went on a tour of the nearly 15,000-squarefoot facility this past Wednesday. July 2. Most came away impressed, convinced that the 17-year-old building is a realistic option for a school to serve the city’s sixth- and seventh- graders.

“With a few modifications, it would work beautifully,” said Michelle Poluikis, a City Council member who works as a paraprofessional for the schools. “The costs that it would save [compared to the proposed new school] could be used to pay higher salaries for teachers. We need for teachers to get higher pay, especially with our starting teachers. If everything [all of the funding] is in the building, there’s nothing left for the teachers.”

A phrase that was uttered repeatedly during the tour was, “This is a no-brainer,” a reference to the options the city faces in finding an acceptable alternative to the decrepit, aging Parry McCluer Middle School, the original building of which dates to the 1920s, and an addition to the 1950s.

The MGCC building, which opened in the fall of 2008 as a Rockbridge area satellite school for then-Dabney S. Lancaster Community College, has seven classrooms, five offices, spacious closets, a dining room and a huge kitchen that was used for teaching culinary arts. There is a greenhouse out back.

City Manager Jason Tyree, a participant in the tour, said it was his understanding that the interior walls separating the rooms are not load-bearing and could therefore be moved, if necessary, to alter the configuration of space. This was brought up during a discussion of whether the wall between the dining room and kitchen could be moved to allow more space in the dining room.

The building, observed Poluikis, who initiated the tour, “is pretty much move-in ready; it meets the basic needs of a school.” She noted that the building and classrooms have been very well maintained. “They’re in much better shape than the current middle school.” There is a 240-space parking lot adjacent to the building while PMMS has only on-street parking.

She acknowledges there are a few downsides to the option of using the MGCC building as a middle school. There is no gymnasium or sound-proofed music room. Vista Links Drive is much more narrow than most city streets. However, she believes each of these issues, while challenging, can be reasonably addressed.

She said City Council member Melvin Henson, the city’s retired public works director and lifetime member of the fire department, is looking into the costs of building a simple metal gym. Henson was involved in planning for a similarly inexpensive structure for the firehouse a few years ago. Soundproofing a classroom for the band and chorus to use shouldn’t be too expensive.

As for narrow Vista Links Drive, Poluikis notes that school buses from Buena Vista and the county are already driving on the road now. Also, “We’re not talking about a parade of buses. They’ll be going in there, loading and unloading students [in the parking lot]. It would be safer than what’s going on now when the buses stop in the road to load and unload students. Plus, there’s no parking there now.” She pointed out that Vista Links Drive could perhaps be widened in the future.

With no studies having been conducted on what it would cost to convert the MGCC building into a middle school, it’s not known what the actual costs would be, though it would surely be just a tiny fraction of $69 million. That’s the latest estimate from CPL Architecture that was given to the school facilities committee recently for a 99,000-squarefoot school for grades pre-k to grade 7 that would be built adjacent to Parry McCluer High School.

That’s a figure that is way beyond Buena Vista’s borrowing capacity. State law prohibits cities from taking on debt that’s more than 10 percent of the value of a city’s taxable real estate. Steve Bolster, the city’s finance director, said that using this formula, the city may be able to legally borrow as much as $42 million. But he wouldn’t recommend borrowing more than 5 percent of the taxable real estate, which would put the limit at around $21 million.

Realistically, though, borrowing even that much money would push the city’s real estate rates up to a level that most citizens likely couldn’t afford to pay. If taxes go too high, Poluikis warns, “We could become a ghost town.”

Avoiding that scenario by looking seriously at the MGCC option seemed a viable option to those who took the tour of the building last week. Tyree was optimistic over the prospect, dubbing it a “win, win, win situation.” The way he figured it, this option would benefit the students and teachers by putting them in a much better learning environment than the current aging school provides. Also, the much lower price than the proposed new school makes much more fiscal sense for the city.

Tyree broached the idea of the city continuing to make the debt payments on the MGCC building, with the School Board incurring the debt for any capital improvements that might have to be made. The city owes about $1,753,000 on the MGCC building, and is currently making annual debt payments of around $181,000. The building won’t be paid off until 2044.

One thing is certain, according to Poluikis. “Something has to be done. We can’t just say, ‘Leave the students in the [current] middle school because we don’t have the money to build a new school.’ I don’t think that’s an option.”

She is hopeful of persuading her fellow City Council members of the merits of the MGCC option and then, perhaps the bigger challenge – convincing the School Board to seriously consider it.