Linda Dawson is IASB director/ editorial services and editor of The Illinois School Board Journal.
Knowing that your school sits at the confluence of two rivers is one thing. Being prepared for a flood is something else altogether.
In September 2008, the remnants of Hurricane Ike that made landfall at Galveston, Texas, dumped 10 inches of rain during two days in the Midwest. It also set off a chain of events for Ottawa ESD 141 that the school board, administration, staff, students and the community could not have imagined.
Looking back from the vantage of 2011, things have turned out well. At the time, it couldn’t have been worse.
As rain saturated Ottawa and the surrounding area, water from the Illinois and Fox rivers began to rise and kept on rising … to 8 feet above flood level. It wasn’t the first time water from the rivers had made its way into Central Intermediate School since it was built in the 1950s. But this probably was the worst. Aerial photos show the school surrounded by water.
Sandbaggers came to help, according to Jama Wahl, Central’s principal, but it was too little too late. Teachers were able to salvage some materials, but the school became unusable. “We learned what it was like to be homeless, to be refugees,” Wahl said.
Of immediate concern was where to house the school’s 405 fifth- and sixth-grade students so that their education would not be interrupted and the district would not lose valuable average daily attendance money. An initial plan sent half of the fifth-graders to the Lincoln Elementary gym, Wahl said. The other half went to the McKinley Elementary gym. Sixth-graders went to Sheppard Middle School that normally houses just seventh- and eighth-graders.
“This was very emotional for students,” Wahl said. Not only were they concerned about being at a different school, they were concerned about “not knowing” things … like how long would they be at a different school and what had happened to their PE shoes and other possessions.
With the stop-gap facilities and other schools and organizations donating supplies, students were back in class within two days. But these temporary quarters were disruptive to the three host schools that needed their gymnasiums for PE classes and other activities.
In looking around the community for other temporary facilities, the board and administration settled on moving fifth-graders into space at the First Church of the Nazarene. The school used the space on weekdays and it was converted back to church use on Sundays. The sixth-graders were kept at Sheppard with the help of mobile classrooms.
“The board and administration realized this was not an ideal situation,” said Craig Doster, District 141 superintendent, but it would get the district through a clean-up phase and possibly to the end of the school year. At this point, everyone believed that the water would recede and the children would be back in school after a clean-up.
In early discussions, the district considered building a levee like what had protected the nearby Ottawa High School, but that had to be abandoned because it would come too close to the building. In addition, planning with the Army Corps of Engineers would have taken several years and the cost was estimated at between $7 million and $10 million. Talk of elevating the building was abandoned because although it would protect from future flooding, it would leave the building inaccessible if there were a flood … something that had already happened 11 times since the facility was built. And estimated costs for elevation of the building could have run as much as $25 million.
In the midst of brain-storming and planning, however, the district received the official bad news in February 2009: Central Intermediate School had been condemned.
“Once the water receded, asbestos was discovered in the crawl space and the floors because it dissolved when it got wet,” said George Reigle, an architect with GreenAssociates, who had been working with the district on clean-up and restoration plans. “They also found bacteria in the dirt in the crawl space and mold in the wood on the first floor.”
In addition, because it had been built on the site of an old coal gasification plant, other chemicals were found on the school property. “This was going to take more than a mop and clean-up,” Reigle said.
Where to now?Immediately the discussion turned to where students could be housed other than at a church and mobile classrooms. The obvious, if rather unconventional, answer became an abandoned 95,000 sq.ft. former Wal-Mart on the north side of town.
“The building would provide enough space to house Central students for two years at a cost of $580,000,” Superintendent Doster said. “It would give the board a little more time to make a decision on permanent facilities while consolidating all the Central students in one location again.”
The floor space in the building allowed for the subdivision of interior space to keep grade teams together while still separating support/group spaces, according to Reigle, the architect. Original lighting and mechanical systems could be retained. PE classes were assigned to the loading dock area, and an area in the back of the building was designed for music classes so that they would not disturb others.
Once the decision was made, the renovation from box store to school was completed within six weeks, in time for Central Intermediate students to be back together for the 2009-10 school year. However, there were still two big problems: the former Wal-Mart was not within the district’s boundaries and the lease payable to Wal-Mart was set to double at the end of 2011.
If the district wished to stay in the Wal-Mart, they would need to purchase the property, at a cost of about $3.3 million and then spend an additional $20.4 million to truly renovate the building for continued use as a school, Doster said.
So the district began looking for land to build a new school.
“If you have the opportunity to purchase land, do so,” Doster said in hindsight. “It will always be cheaper now than in the future.”
Luckily, the district was able to identify a 46-acre site adjacent to Sheppard Middle School, which houses the district’s seventh- and eighth-graders. While the initial asking price was $50,000 an acre, the district was able to negotiate a price of just $17,750 an acre, Doster said. But how would the district pay for a new school?
Finding the moneyInitial figures from the Federal and Illinois Emergency Management agencies (FEMA/IEMA) and Illinois State Board of Education construction grants might give the district at the least $10 million and possibly as much as $20 million, for new construction. No one was sure how much insurance actually would cover and the sale of the Central School site also was an unknown.
Estimates of how much money the district might need from local taxpayers were anywhere up to $18.5 million. And in order to get started on a construction project to avoid the 2011 lease increase on the Wal-Mart property, decisions needed to be made quickly, Doster said.
On December 15, 2009, the board approved a referendum to ask voters for the $18.5 million, with the provision that any building bonds issued or levies imposed would be reduced by the amount that the district received in outside funding.
The resolution left just six weeks before the February 2, 2010, primary election where the referendum would appear on the ballot.
The board and the administration reached out to Jane Goetz, whose children had attended District 141 schools and whose grandchildren also would be attending there, to chair the referendum campaign.
A committee was formed and members reached out to key community stakeholders, she said, representing trades people, educators, city government, financial planners, local business and the board of education to encourage people to support the referendum. They also reached out to community groups, like service organizations, unions and education organizations, to inform people of the need.
“The good thing about a quick turnaround is that the opposition has little time to organize,” Goetz said. But a quick turnaround also means supporters must have a clear message.
Goetz said the main message was to break down the tax increase into information that people could process. That meant coming up with comparisons that were understandable. So they used items that people might buy every week to describe the amount of increase that residents might see on their property taxes.
On property with a market value of $100,000, someone could expect an annual increase of $101 or $2 per week (the cost of one soda). For property valued at $135,000, it would mean an increase of $145 a year or $3 a week (the cost of one DVD rental). For property worth $225,000, it would mean an increase of $256 or $5.25 a week (the cost of lunch at McDonald’s).
The strategy worked, and in February 2010, Ottawa ESD 141 became the first district in the state to pass a tax referendum in just six weeks, Doster said. Costs for the project were set at $22.5 million, which represented the minimum the district might receive from outside sources plus the $18.5 million approved by voters.
Since the referendum’s approval, the board has learned that it should receive $10.5 million from FEMA/IEMA, $1.9 million from insurance and $10.5 from a construction grant. “That leaves just two to five million that will be needed in bond sales of the originally approved $18.5 million,” he said.
Construction is well underway and the district expects to have students in the new building by January 2012.
What can be learned?While the board and administration are extremely pleased that things have turned out well, they have learned a number of things along the way, Doster said, and would like to offer these “take-aways” for all districts before they face a natural disaster of their own:
• Review and practice the district’s crisis management plan.
• Know the district’s available resources and talents before a crisis occurs.
• Acquire land that may be useful to the district if it becomes available.
• Think about how you would house students for a week, a month or a year if something happened to one of your buildings.
• Know connections and resources that might exist within the board and administration, such as service organization funding opportunities, and from city, county, state and federal sources.
• Maintain on-going relationships with religious and civic leaders.
• Know if your consultants (architectural and engineering) are staffed sufficiently to be of assistance during a crisis.
• Maintain a communications network with community and staff, and have a district spokesperson.
• Document all aspects of an emergency from the first day.
• Coordinate and maintain paperwork in one place.
• Keep consistent pressure on state and federal agencies even if it means daily phone calls, and involve local legislators.
• Make sure board members have support systems in place and that they are prepared and informed to be decisive as needed.