HUSD looks to move district office to media center

The Healdsburg Unified School District is moving ahead with
plans to convert the high school media center to its new district
office, replacing portable buildings district leaders say are
falling apart.
On Wednesday, Nov. 18 the Board of Trustees is expected to award
a contract to architect Cynthia Ketelsen to design plans for a
remodel that will transform the center into more than a dozen
offices for the district’s administrative team. The renovation
project is expected to cost an estimated $250,000 and will need to
be approved by the Division of State Architect before construction
can begin.
“The timeframe is really out of our control,” said
superintendent Jeff Harding. “We anticipate once we get our DSA
approval and select a contractor the work is fairly straight
forward and can be done in probably a matter of two weeks.” He did
not expect that to happen before the next school year.
The district office is currently housed in portables in the high
school parking lot and administrators use a portable bathroom
facility. According to Harding, inspectors discovered the walls are
rotting, the buildings are not ADA accessible and the district
wastes money pumping sewage from the portable bathroom. “The
problem won’t go away,” said Harding. “We need to do something and
we need to act.”
On Oct. 21 the school board considered six options to fix its
district office problem, opting for the media center remodel after
reviewing a feasibility study that ranked it higher than five other
alternatives. Other options included replacing the rotting
portables with new ones, moving the district office to the old Foss
Creek campus or leasing office space, plans the report found cost
more and were not as desirable.
The media center was a source of controversy this year after
Harding discovered the lease between the district and the city—an
agreement that allowed the Access Healdsburg public television
station to use the facility—had lapsed in 2007. The previous
agreement called for AHTV to provide students with 18 hours of
instructional time inside the media center in lieu of paying
rent.
Harding concluded the deal was a bad one for the cash-strapped
district and asked AHTV to pay the going market rate or move to the
Foss Creek facility. The AHTV board later resigned in protest and
new station leadership has since moved operations to Foss Creek.
The media center is still home to broadcasting equipment for public
television but all filming and editing facilities have been
relocated.
No one spoke against the plan to convert the media center to a
district office at the Oct. 21 meeting, although teacher and union
representative Barbara Pinney did take issue with spending $250,000
on the project. “We need to have quality facilities for our
students,” she said. “That’s vastly more important than having
quality facilities for adults who are there to serve the
students.”
Harding countered that potential lawsuits against the district
for offices not compliant with ADA regulations could prove far more
costly and point out that utility and sewage costs would also go
down. “We would be inviting that suit and I don’t think we can
afford to do that.”
District leaders also hope a new district office with a room for
the Healdsburg Education Foundation will aid fundraising efforts,
money that will also help justify the expense.
“When a place looks crummy, they don’t give you money,” said
board president Mary Burke. “To glean the kind of donations we
might need or seek, you need to present yourself with a
professional site that houses your leadership.”
If the board moved forward with design plans next week the final
designs won’t be approved until next year.