Trustees consider school repair proposals

Ramona Unified School District trustees are scheduled to review a proposed three-year deferred maintenance plan at their meeting Thursday.

The Dec. 18 meeting will begin at 7 p.m. in the Wilson Administrative Center, 720 Ninth St.

The list of proposed projects, if approved, would cost $1 million from 2014-16 and would include items such as fire alarms, turf fields, Barnett playground replacement, carpeting, Hanson Elementary sewer system design work, parking lot and playground sealing, roof repairs and emergency heating and air conditioning unit replacement.

During their November meeting, trustees discussed what failure of the district’s $40 million bond bid means to the repair, maintenance and upgrade projects on the bond list. They asked staff for a needs assessment in order of priority and for details of the maintenance budget — how much goes for labor, benefits and materials.

Board president Dawn Perfect noted that $32 million of the $40 million bond bid was to repay a 2004 construction loan, but the list of repair and maintenance items “doesn’t go away.”

“Those things continue to still be needs,” she said.

The overwhelming response of Ramonans on local online forums, she said, has been “what’s next...and even how can we help?”

Monetary donations to the district are always accepted, said Assistant Superintendent David Ostermann.

“We keep track of all the different funds and different pots of dollars, so if someone wants to donate a dollar and says, ‘I want this to go to X,’ unless it’s illegal...yes, we take it,” he said.

At their Nov. 20 meeting, for example, trustees approved two donations from Rhonda Cooke: $1,000 for the Montecito High School construction program and $600 worth of building material for the Montecito High program.

Another Ramona resident, Jane Tanaka, M.D., has pledged $250 a month for the next nine years to go toward repayment of the district’s loan. She also pledged the same amount to Friends of Ramona Unified Schools (FORUS) to go toward that nonprofit’s health and safety projects for the schools.

“If anybody in the public would rather go that route, certainly that’s no problem,” Ostermann said of FORUS.

“They’ve contacted us, they’ve worked with us, they’ve walked on our roofs, we’ve worked with them to bring in their own roofer to help do repairs, which really has helped to extend the life of some of our roofs,” Ostermann said.

The district would designate any monetary donations it received to help pay off the certificate of participation loan (COP), said Ostermann.

“We’ll track it and set it up in its own account that this is dollars that we got just for the COP, and that would lessen the expense that the general fund would have to pay for that year,” he said.

Trustee Rodger Dohm suggested honoring people for their donations.

“In some districts they call that Partners in Education, and they’re on a list, they’re on a website, recognizing them for the work,” said Dohm.

He also suggested people could donate to Montecito High’s construction program, saying, “they’re looking for projects to do, and that would support the class.”

“It could be kind of a jigsaw puzzle putting it together, but I think we’ve got a lot of support both within the district as well as outside of the district,” he said. “We just need to communicate it in such as way that people could buy into it.”

Trustee Bob Stoody discussed the possibility of refinancing the loan in 2017, when that becomes an option.

“As we’re approaching this from multi-prong ways of solving it...until 2017, gather what money we can from where we can,” he said, citing selling property as one way to garner money.

Prior to the economic downtown of 2007-08, the state required school districts to put 3 percent of its budget in a Routine Restricted Maintenance Account (RRMA). During the fiscal crisis, the state allowed districts to put that money in the general fund and, Ostermann said, the Ramona district used it to save programs and jobs.

“Next year, all those regulations come back, so we need to fully fund the RRMA,” he said, noting that will mean pulling about $500,000 from the general fund to the maintenance account.