Giltner School Board may rerun bond issue

The outcome of a board retreat by the Giltner School Board on Monday night was a plan to possibly make a second try at getting a bond approved by voters to make renovations and additions to the school in Giltner. The scaled back proposal could go before district voters as early as spring of next year. 
With the defeat of the bond issue during the May 14 Primary Election, Supt. Nick Mumm said Tobin Buchanan from First National Capital Markets has advised the board give it another try. 
“That’s what (Buchanan’s) opinion was, to rerun it,” Mumm said. “He’s never seen anybody not rerun it at least one time after all the time and effort that’s been put into it and you ask for feedback. He’s saying the opportunity should be to try to go out and see what people say, especially if it sounds like we’re moving in the direction of separation of the child center and the school district. That’s going to get some people on board.”
The board plans to vote during its regular school board meeting on Monday on whether or not to rerun the bond issue and to make decisions with regard to relocating the Little Stingers Daycare. Board members agreed that items included in the previous plan for the school bond, such as new locker rooms, a new kitchen and cafeteria, a science room, additional bathrooms, a new classroom and a new corridor on the north side of the school’s gym, needed to be part of the revised plan.
“Michael (Wilson) and I were kind of talking about this, where you’ve got that entrance into the locker rooms on the north side, you could bust that wide open there and make an entrance just right there, where you have a sidewalk that walks down into it,” Lyon commented.
Mumm noted that the proposed conference room in the previous plan could become an additional classroom for students. 
“The conference room could be a conference room for staff and kids to work in,” Mumm said. “But if it was like, ‘Hey, we’ve got to have another classroom,’ it would need to be the size where it could turned into a classroom. So it really was two rooms which they could create another room in here.”

Little Stingers Daycare
Despite the Little Stingers Daycare no longer being part of the school’s plan, the daycare will have to be moved to a different location to allow renovations to take place.
“If we’re going to move forward on some kind of project with the locker rooms, kitchen, cafeteria, we have to move those buildings so it’s part of the expense anyway,” Lyon said. “If somebody says something, you can say, we’re trying to move forward without a bond, at least initially to do that. We’ve got to find that money to get those moved out of the way so we can move forward with other ideas for what they need.”
Daycare director Mandy Eastman was consulted as to how the board could move forward to provide funding for the daycare’s relocation and establishment of a basement through potential grants or foundations.
“(Foundations) want to see community involvement and community buy-in,” Eastman stated. “But we haven’t been able to even announce that, ‘Oh, we’re looking at moving these,’ because we’ve been waiting to know, can we do the ground? What’s the foundation’s plan? Who’s financially responsible? Whose buildings are they? That’s all I was hoping would get covered.”
Eastman noted that the daycare will have to be able to gain most of the funding through its available resources to potentially qualify for a grant.
“So community buy-in – I’m going just use the Scott and Sherwood Foundations for example – they’ll fund probably 20 percent, if you have the other 80 percent,” she explained. “Whether it be the school district is going to do the electrical, the XYZ and so then you got this much money from a foundation and this much money from fundraisers, but they’re not going to fund the whole thing.”
Lyon mentioned that the daycare buildings are currently owned by the school, but said the ownership could be transferred to the Giltner Public School Foundation, to provide more funding opportunities.
“If we move them, it makes sense to me that their district owned,” Lyon said. “The district is going to be moving those and doing whatever it is, whether that’s funded by the foundation grants, tax dollars, however that looks, but the school owns those, so they can’t do anything until commitments are exactly made that we are going to move this stuff. ‘This is what we’re going to do to it, it’s going to be in this location,’ those types of things.”
Mumm listed the potential costs of the project which he said could total up to $300,000, including the costs of moving both buildings ($25,000), another $50,000 to build a basement for one building and four-foot footings for the other. In addition he said installing sewer and water could cost $20,000 and electricity another $10,000.
“I budget by overestimating things because that’s how I’ve been trained to budget,” he commented. “So all these things are at the absolute top end and probably are not at that exact number.”
He added that by having only the basement designated as a storm shelter and storage area the price of establishing the basement could be cut by half.
He said funding could also be made available if the basement was established as a community storm shelter.
“It would always be for people in the community to know that it is always open under an emergency when it comes to a tornado or a situation, if the community is allowed to go into that location to be safe on a Sunday night, at midnight or whatever it is,” Mumm explained. “There is money out there to help pay for that, because now it becomes a community shelter.”
The board also suggested that building a breezeway to connect the two buildings could help with staffing the daycare.
“We just want to make it so you don’t have to worry about staffing two separate buildings,” said Brad Schutt, board treasurer.
The board plans to vote during its regular school board meeting on Monday to allocate $150,000 towards the removal of the daycare buildings from their current location to potentially assist the foundation in relocating the daycare.

Rerunning the school bond
If the school board decides to make another attempt at getting voters to approve a bond issue, the election would not happen until the next regular election in April 2026 or a special election could be scheduled for April 2025.
“March or April is as quick as you could run it,” Mumm said. “You wouldn’t start building until August or September (of 2025).”