Sean C. Morgan
District 55 completed a contract last week at a meeting Wednesday night to lease Pleasant Valley Kindergarten to Little Promises Daycare.
Little Promises will move from its location at Sweet Home Evangelical Church to Pleasant Valley in August.
Little Promises and the district agreed to a two-year contract. The first year, Little Promises will pay $1,000 per month to the district. The second year, the rental price will be renegotiated based on Little Promises? financial performance.
Under the agreement, Little Promises volunteers can exchange hours working on the building for rent at the rate of $10 per hour.
Their work will include a variety of activities, such as pressure washing the building and painting. If their volunteer hours exceed the monthly rent, the credit will carry over to the following month.
Every month, Little Promises would turn in a log of volunteer hours for review by Business Manager Kevin Strong and Maintenance Supervisor Ron Andrews.
?Initially, Little Promises plans to do a lot of work on painting and other work,? Stron said. Once the initial work is done, the district expects the amount of volunteer work credited for rent would drop off.
?Initially, there is a lot work, especially on the outside of the building,? Little Promises owner Anita Hutchins told the board. ?We have knowledgeable, qualified people, contractors, who are willing to come and do that work.”
The inside of the building doesn?t need as much work to get it rentable, Hutchins said. Overall, the work, at $10 an hour, is cheaper than hiring contractors to do the work.
Other facilities
The district is continuing to plan what to do with other buildings. Last month, the Facility Planning Committee presented a list of recommendations to the School Board.
The committee included 17 members of the community and district personnel. They spent the previous five months researching and discussing facility needs in District 55.
?Over time, the entire group found that personal wants at times had to be let go of for the good of the entire district,? Supt. Larry Horton said. ?I am pleased to say that the recommendations below were in the end reached with 100 percent consensus by the group.?
The original charge before the committee addressed three main questions, what to do with Pleasant Valley, what to do with Crawfordsville and Holley and what long-range planning the district can do districtwide.
The committee recommended leasing as much of Pleasant Valley as possible and place the revenues into an ongoing special reserve account to help build additional classrooms throughout the district when and where needed.
The recommendation suggested subdividing land and selling off two 2.5-acre parcels for the special fund. It also suggests selling the facility within three years and adding those proceeds to the special fund.
With Holley and Crawfordsville, the committee presented several ideas.
— Convert Crawfordsville School into either a ?magnet? school or charter school. If the decision is a charter school, the recommendation is to look at the feasibility of the charter program being done by the district or by a private group.
— Crawfordsville students will have priority in enrollment if the decision is to turn it into a charter school.
— Crawfordsville students not interested in the charter or magnet school concept will attend Holley.
— If enrollments outgrow current space at Holley or Crawfordsville, remodeling will be done as needed and funded through the special building fund.
— Enrollment boundaries may need to be adjusted.
— If enrollments at either Holley or Crawfordsville drop below 60 students, that school should be closed and the students moved to the other schools.
— If combined enrollments at Holley and Crawfordsville drop below 150 students, close the school with the fewest students and move the remaining students to another school.
In other business, the School Board:
— Gave a favorable evaluation to Supt. Horton. Out of 22 areas, he received a score of up to five on a scale of one to five. He averaged 4.5.
Supt. Horton received positive comments from the board, former Chairman Don Hopkins said. The evaluation was ?very good,? and the board appreciates his devotion to the students, staff and community.
— Accepted the resignations of high school teachers Jon Cohrs and Dean Friesen.
— Hired Milli Bostrom as food services manager, Jeff Lansing as Foster counselor, Karen Bowman as Title I at Hawthorne and Stormie Lineberger as Title I at Oak Heights and Crawfordsville.
— Appointed Scott Proctor as the new chairman, Mike Reynolds as Vice Chairman and Dianne Gerson as Secretary.