The Montezuma-Cortez School District Re-1 Board of Education approved a six-step plan to address pressing structural needs, as proposed by Kyle Archibeque, director of finance.
“I call it a six-step plan to get us back on track,” he said Tuesday. “So we can we can get back to having a good schedule and making sure everything’s maintained.”
After that work is complete, he will present the board with options for future projects.
“Construction in new schools and things like that are nice, but they're also expensive,” he said. “And another thing that came up when I got here was salary schedules and how we fail to pay very well. We're not very competitive to our surrounding districts.”
There have been discussions about consolidating the elementary schools, by either closing one and expanding the other two, building one central elementary school or having kindergarten and first grade at one, second and third at another and fourth and fifth at the last, he said.
Another potential initiative could be increasing teacher salaries. Right now, teachers start at a salary of about $32,000, he said.
Archibeque assumed his role in January. He took over the responsibility of overseeing facility operation — handling construction, procurement and presenting bids, he said.
At that time, he said “there were some things maybe falling through the cracks,” and he set to work on a facilities master plan.
In 2009, a Colorado Department of Education team surveyed the district’s buildings. A facilities master plan was drafted for the district in 2011. That plan surveyed each of the district’s buildings and listed any problems that needed to be addressed based on level of severity.
The costs in that plan ran from $45 million to renovate schools to replacing all buildings for $109 million — although the numbers likely would look different today, Archibeque said.
“That's where they got the plan to tear down the high school, and then go out and get a bond and build a new one,” he said.
Montezuma-Cortez High School was completed in 2015.
“That's what came out of the facilities master plan,” he said. “However, there were lots of other identified things in there that needed to probably be addressed.”
That’s what Archibeque is evaluating now.
He’s analyzing a five-year spreadsheet the district has maintained, which lists items that need to be fixed, updated or replaced.
His six-step proposal, delivered at the Aug. 16 board meeting, addressed the most critical of those needs. It was accepted with one caveat: that Manaugh Elementary’s roof, instead of being replaced, be repaired to obtain another three to four years of use, he said.
Water leaks at some of the elementary schools led the district to evaluate its school roofs, he said.
As part of his plan, the roof at Mesa Elementary would be replaced. Carpet would be replaced at Montezuma-Cortez Middle School, Mesa and Manaugh. The district also is looking at replacing the roof of Lewis-Arriola Elementary, and, down the line, that of the middle school.
The district will explore finally completing Manaugh’s new playground project, which was backed by a $100,000 Great Outdoor Colorado grant – as well as $10,000 raised from the community – two years ago, he said.
When all this is taken care of, Archibeque will present for board approval a larger capital reserve plan and a regular maintenance schedule.
Finally, the district will generate a new facilities master plan, like the one created in 2011, but this time updated for change in material costs and current needs.
“We know if we do it now, these needs are already going to be identified,” he said.
The current immediate renovations should be done by the end of the 2021, or, at the latest, the beginning of 2022, Archibeque said.
The district then will choose how it wants to focus its energy moving forward.
“There are certain things identified that need to be fixed right now,” he said. “And then we can get to the conversation of ‘OK, what do we want to do going forward? Do we want to just maintain what we got the best we can and focus on salary schedules? Or do we want to just focus on raising the salary schedules a little bit when we can and focus on trying to get new buildings for the school district?”
The district will seek community input throughout the process, he said.
“It's not going to be overnight, and they (the projects) might not come through because there’s lots of other variables,” he said.
The district will have to propose a bond to local voters for whichever project it decides to move forward with, he said.
As of two years ago, the most money the district would’ve been able to acquire through bond was $40 million, he said.
He wants to get an update on that figure and the potential for receiving a state Building Excellent Schools Today grant.
The board also voted to return Lakeview School to its previous owners, as it was mainly being used for storage. The district now has a warehouse that can accommodate things like student desks used for testing, he said.
