The Jacksonville/North Pulaski School District will build a new elementary school on the current site of Tolleson Elementary.
District officials got the OK from its School Board on Monday to buy a sliver of land -- 4.21 acres -- on the northeast corner of Harris and General Samuels roads for $63,150. The district owns the land on which Tolleson sits, and the purchase will extend the ownership through General Samuels.
Monday's unanimous approval ends the district's attempts for the past several months to build a new elementary school on undeveloped property leased from Little Rock Air Force Base. A few wrinkles and the lengthy process forced the district to look at other options for the school replacing both Tolleson and Arnold Drive elementaries.
"We've done enough investigation to know that clearly it's going to be more cost effective," Superintendent Tony Wood said. "There are not challenges on the Tolleson site that there were evident on the other site."
The school district is a party in a decadeslong Pulaski County federal school desegregation lawsuit, meaning that it, too, is required to equalize the condition of its older schools -- including the two elementaries -- with new schools elsewhere in Pulaski County.
In February, voters in the school district approved a 7.6-mill property tax increase to help Jacksonville/North Pulaski finance the construction of a new high school and the replacement elementary school. That money will help with the land purchase, Wood said.
The district had originally started discussions with the U.S. Department of Defense to build an elementary school on the Air Force Base with the idea that the federal department would give the district $8 million to do so, Wood said. The department had prioritized schools nationwide, placing more than 30 in California ahead of Jacksonville, but the schools had to find matching funds, he said.
"As we became real active in trying to secure the funding for our community, our school district, the political process in California flexed their muscles, and they actually came up with the match for all 32 schools," Wood said. "So the funding stream from the Department of Defense was no longer available."
The district began reviewing its other options but still wanted to open the new school by August 2018. It found the Tolleson site with the help of Daniel Gray, the School Board president and a real estate agent. Gray waived his commission to help the district purchase the land.
"The site is, I think, just a better site for us," Gray said. "I think the ingress, egress off of General Samuels and Harris Road from a traffic standpoint, and just the visibility of the school, the presence, we will be able to do quite a bit more for our kids on this site."
The Air Force property would have been on 23 acres, only five of which were usable, he added.
The purchase will connect the elementary and Jacksonville Middle School campuses and would not disrupt students at the existing Tolleson Elementary.
It also means the district will veer from its original plan of a two-story elementary school to a one-story building, the School Board agreed Monday. A one-story building serving the same amount of students -- 648 --would produce "significant cost savings," Wood said, adding he didn't know an exact estimate.
"A considerable amount of money saved is very important to this community and to myself and to the board," School Board member Jim Moore said.
Single-story was the wisest way to go if it would save more money, Gray said.
"Single-story, two-story, especially right there on the corner of Harris and General Samuels, either one of them is going to look great," he said.
Metro on 10/04/2016