School Committee Will Recommend Keeping Fellows and Selling GW Carver

A committee vetting the Board's long range building plan decided Thursday to recommend that the district rebuild School at its and strongly encourage the sale of the district's GW Carver Avenue property in Somerset.

The Community Facilities Committee's formal recommendation will be made during the school board meeting Monday. The only major recommended change is to sell the that's been marked as a school in the Somerset development since the late 1990s.

This recommendation remains a draft until Friday morning. Facilities committee chairman Duane Reeves said Thursday that any suggested changes needed to be sent to him by 9 a.m. Friday, before the official recommendation is finalized and posted on the Ames Community School District's website.

The board's plan currently calls for replacing three elementary school buildings — , and — and renovating and remodeling and . Both Meeker and Edwards would be replaced with newer, three-section schools. Meeker would be built on site and Edwards would be rebuilt on property along Miller Avenue. Fellows would be replaced with a four-section school on the same site. A renovated Sawyer would become a three-section school, and a renovated Mitchell would become a two-section school. The full plan can be found here.

Chuck Winkleblack, a member of the facilities committee, said when talking to parents about Fellows Elementary School, the majority supported keeping Fellows in its current location. If it were moved people wouldn't support it “nearly as vigorously,” he said.

Reeves has said at previous meetings that the committee felt that the GW Carver site would be a good place for infill development. Homes built there would bring the district additional students and property taxes.

Other parts of the building plan include selling the district's old middle school site on State Street, its property on Sixth Street, the Crawford site where the district administration offices are now, the Edwards site, the Willson-Beardshear site, Roosevelt Elementary and the district's rental home.

The district's 24^th Street triangle property would be developed for athletic fields and administrative space.

Ames School District Superintendent Tim Taylor said that the would be properly studied to see if it would be better to renovate the building or build new by April. The district also plans to start talking with the city about a new pool, which could be paid for with local option sales tax funds.

The elementary building plan for three new schools and two renovated schools is scheduled to go to a vote in April. Voters will likely be asked to approve a $55 million general obligation bond that would raise property taxes by about $1.13 per $1,000 assessed valuation. Commercial property valued at $100,000 would see a $113 annual increase in the school district's share of the property tax bill. Residential property valued at $100,000 would see a $53.84 increase in the school district's share of the property tax bill.

Though the committee's recommendation will be finalized Friday morning, the committee's work is really just beginning.

“Now we have to go back into the community and really rally this,” Reeves said.

After the board formulates the bond language, the facilities committee will have to collect about 1,700 signatures to petition for a referendum and then work to encourage people to vote in its favor.

Facilities member Kevin Stow, who helped pass the for the project in November, said the friends of the library group formed a political action committee that raised $8,000 to encourage the bond's passage.

“We have zero for a $55 million bond,” he said.