Board votes to create committee to look at Boys and Girls Club

The School District 6 School Board agreed Monday evening to establish a committee to look into what conditions it would want in place before pursuing a partnership with the Boys and Girls Club to build a new facility on the Ruder Elementary School campus.

One month after hearing a proposal from Freedom Bank President Don Bennett to build a new $5.5 million, 27,000-square-foot facility on school property adjacent to the Ruder Elementary gym, the board unanimously decided to form the committee, but also expressed concern about the project.

“Until we have finalized our plans about what we want to do with the elementary schools, I don’t see how we can commit some of our property that we bought for school purposes to an outside group,” board member Larry Wilson said. “The financial breakdown they provided for us is so general and so up in the air that there is nothing that can be gained from reading it. They have $150,000 in grants this year, but grants don’t come every year. What is their plan for going forward? I just don’t see anything there that indicates real financial planning for maintaining this thing once it’s built. It really worries me.”

Board member Mike Nicosia was worried about what would happen to the facility if the Boys and Girls Club was unable to keep it open.

“My concern is that the Boys and Girls Club is not necessarily a growing agency. They are consolidating and closing facilities all over the country. I am also concerned that, if the building is built and something happens that it becomes non-operational, where are we,” he asked. “If we put an agreement together, that building would have to revert back to the district. We can’t have it for sale out there for anyone to purchase.”

The Boys and Girls club currently owns an old church on Fourth Avenue that is being utilized for its after school programs, along with the gym at the old junior high school. The program currently serves about 60 kids, but could serve as many as 300 with the new facility.

Despite its concerns, the school board is still open to the idea of partnering with the Boys and Girls Club to build the new facility, but would like to brainstorm ideas of what the district would like to see in the new building.

“We really haven’t taken as much time to develop our own thoughts on the matter as we could have in the last year,” board Vice Chair Dean Chisholm said. “We need to sit down and come up with a list of things we would like to see in that new building. We should at least do that to see if they can accommodate what we are wanting to make it useful to us.”

“I am not opposed to talking with them for however long it takes. I am opposed to being rushed into something before we know what it is,” Wilson added.

Superintendent Steve Bradshaw said the district hopes to have its first report from the new committee ready for the March school board meeting, but is not sure there is time to make that possible.

- In other action Monday, the school board voted to renew its membership in the Montana School Board Association, but had reservations about future membership if the organization does not start doing a better job of voicing the funding concerns of Class A schools to the state legislature.

One of the main concerns was that membership fees for the organization increased by 3 percent while the legislature only passed an increase of 0.91 percent for Class A school funding this year.

“We need to send them the message that a portion of our board won’t vote to renew next year if the percentage increase is more than the increase they negotiate with the state legislature for us,” Chisholm said. “Maybe what we are trying to communicate is that we wish that in their lobbying efforts, the school boards association communicated the frustration and effort at the same level that we feel. Sometimes it feels like they have their own political agenda to protect and they take a soft line when we need a hard line.”

Board Chair Jill Rocksund said the organization may do a good job of representing Montana schools as a whole, but the needs of Class A schools seem to get lost in the shuffle.

“In some ways, the groups working together, it is mostly beneficial as far as lobbying efforts go. On the other hand, I think we have lost our own individuality and our own voice and we wind up sacrificing our district needs for the unity of the MTSBA. I’m not sure whether that is a good trade off at all,” she said. “Most of the gains we’ve received have been in the form of the ability to increase taxes at the local level without the state picking up a higher share of the responsibility.”