WILBURN -- In less than eight minutes Wednesday, the former Wilburn school campus was splintered into three pieces.
Annexed to the Concord School District in July 2004, the school site had sat empty for years after the last elementary students departed. It was used occasionally for reunions, fundraisers and as a community safe room during storms.
Concord school officials had searched for ways to unload the closed site. But the district still owes about $685,000 in bonds on the campus that transferred over during the annexation, limiting what it could do to shed the campus without affecting the tax-exempt status of the bonds.
On Wednesday morning, the district took the unusual step of auctioning off the campus of seven buildings and nearly 19 acres, including a baseball field.
The sale through Wilson Auctioneers brought the Concord district $105,000, which Superintendent Michael Davidson figures the School Board will use to pay down the bonds owed on the former campus.
"This is such a rarity," he said. "There's not a big market out there for school buildings."
Jay Cupit, the supervisor of the Cleburne County Community Work Program, purchased the biggest tract of almost 14 acres and six buildings for $60,000, plus a $6,000 commission to Wilson Auctioneers. He plans on using the site -- including a cafeteria, gymnasium, elementary building and library -- as a residential drug and alcohol treatment center.
"Our plans are to put in a faith-based drug treatment program," the Heber Springs resident said. "I work for the county and have been in law enforcement my entire life. You just see such a need for it. I see it every day. These guys are struggling with drug and alcohol addictions and needing a place to come and get some help."
A 1-acre tract with a vocational and agricultural building sold for $30,000, plus a $3,000 commission to the auctioneers, while the 4-acre baseball field sold to Jimmy Floyd for $15,000, plus a $1,500 commission to the auctioneers.
Floyd, who graduated from Wilburn in 1964, said he had no plans for the field. He just wanted to keep it in the community.
Davidson said the sale was a "sad situation."
"Any consolidation is, when people lose their school," he said. "The school is the community. I hate it. The board just wants someone to utilize those buildings instead of them just continuing to deteriorate."
The Wilburn School District was one of several affected by the passage of Act 60 of 2003, which required districts with fewer than 350 students to consolidate with or be annexed into other districts before July 1, 2004.
Campus closings are not uncommon when two districts merge, said Terry Granderson, interim director of the Arkansas Department of Education's Division of Public School Academic Facilities and Transportation.
"The general format is when two districts merge, generally, if they are really trying to save money, they will consolidate and get down to one high school and try to keep a local elementary school for the smaller kids," he said. "Sometimes, depending on the enrollment, that gets to be too expensive, so they close it."
The Education Department maintains a list of vacated school buildings, but Granderson said the list is incomplete and always evolving. Right now, there are about 65 buildings as varied as the Elaine fieldhouse and the Wheatley bus shop on the list.
What happens to these empty school buildings depends on the circumstances. Some districts turn old school buildings into storage buildings, Granderson said. But those buildings have to meet minimum fire and safety codes, which costs districts money.
Concord looked for buyers for the Wilburn grounds, including talking with economic developers, after the school was closed, Davidson said.
About three years ago, the campus started experiencing a number of break-ins, with copper wiring, plumbing and air conditioners being stolen. The vandalism and theft hastened the School Board's decision to unload the campus.
On Wednesday morning, a mixture of about 65 bidders and curious community members gathered in the campus's cafeteria for the auction.
Some visitors took one last look around the campus and walked through the old elementary school, where a forlorn pencil sharpener hung from one wall and a globe, with its map peeling from its orb, sat on the floor.
Joe R. Wilson, owner of Wilson Auctioneers, which conducts about 150 real estate auctions a year, agreed with Davidson that the auctioning of a school is rare.
"It's about the second or third [school auction] we've done," he said. "It's been done. It's not like a hundred-acre cattle farm or three-bedroom house that lots of people want, though. I mean: What do you do? You got to have a specific purpose."
After a brief message on how the auction would proceed, Wilson started.
With a cadence of auctioning chants answered by reply bids, the campus -- located on a right-angle turn on Arkansas 110 in eastern Cleburne County -- was gone.
Afterward, a few alumni of the school milled around the grounds, talking about the glory days and the future of their old school.
"Maybe the upside of the situation is that there's a business coming in that might offer a few jobs to the community ... and the ball field is going to remain the same," said Denise Mann of Rose Bud, who graduated from Wilburn in 1984.
Mann was joined by her friends, Shae McMillion of Pangburn, who graduated from Wilburn in 1985, and Diana Dill, a 1992 Wilburn graduate who lives in the community. The three remembered a Wilburn ritual in which some students rode their horses to school on the final day of classes each spring, along with other memories, while bidding their campus goodbye.
"It's sad," Dill said. "It was going to happen, so there's nothing you can do about it. It's better than letting it sit here and rot. There's a lot of memories here."
State Desk on 07/09/2015