By Rumasa Noor
Staff Writer
At the Walworth Joint School District 1 Board of Education meeting on June 22, Schneider Electric was awarded a contract that will allow it to carry out maintenance at school, said Interim District Administrator Pam Larson.
On May 18, the School District approved to borrow $6,805,000, under Act 32, to address its immediate maintenance needs.
Act 32 allows schools to borrow a certain amount under the condition that each project must involve saving energy.
The decision raised some eyebrows at the June 2 public hearing. Four out of 18 people, 10 of whom were staff members, favored the building of a new school. But School Board President Linda Freeman said she has yet to hear a response from more people.
“We are only allowed by the state to borrow five percent of the equalized value of the district’s taxable property, which means we could borrow up to $17 million,” she said. “Well, $17 million will never build a school of the size that we have currently, nor the land that we need because we don’t own land.”
The school’s maintenance issues include building, plumbing, lighting, heating, mechanical and several other repairs.
“We have a number of things that need to be updated and they are old, they are not as efficient as they could be,” she said.
The building of Highway 14 is also a concern for many in Walworth including Freeman.
“If we have Highway 14 that’s going to come within 70 feet of our building, and we will not be able to open all those windows because of the noise, the pollution and we feel that we need to air condition those rooms so that classes can go on and everyone is comfortable,” Freeman said.
She said if it wasn’t for Highway 14, they wouldn’t even consider air conditioning. The highway will lead right through the school’s parking lot, which is troubling for the school and its student body, she said.
“What needs to happen is to have those property values go up,” Larson said.
An alternative option to constructing a new school would be building a much smaller school, but they would still need to take care of the repair issues of the existing building, she said.
“We can discuss this, and if everybody is in favor of a new school, it’s something that we can definitely consider going down the road,” Freeman said. “It would have to be a referendum, everybody would have to be willing to do that. It’s a very big expenditure.”
At the meeting, Schneider Electric predicted that the cost of a new school would be around $50 million. A board member said it might cost $27 million, which is still $10 million more than their borrowing limit of $17 million, Larson said.
“The state hasn’t even finalized their budgets. We have no idea what we are going to be receiving,” Freeman said.
