Pine Crest campus up for grabs: Charter school, Twin Hills both bidding for vacant site

About 100 parents and community members descended on the Nov. 10 Sebastopol Union Schools District (SUSD) board of trustees meeting after learning of SUSD’s negotiations with the Twin Hills Union School District to possibly lease the site of Pine Crest Elementary to SunRidge Charter School.
The crowd was comprised largely of parents and board members of Sebastopol Independent Charter School (SICS), which is attached to SUSD and houses its Kindergarten through second grade classes on the Brook Haven Middle School campus.
“We were surprised this item was on the agenda,” SICS Board Chair Zac Douch said, asking if negotiations were at the beginning or final stages.
Douch added that he was disappointed that SUSD would negotiate with an outside district and expressed his hope that their negotiations would be able to resume in the near future.
“We ran out of time to sign a lease and feel that it’s an unfinished conversation,” he said.
Last fall, SUSD announced its intention to close the Pine Crest campus as the district struggled to close a $500,000 budget gap. Enrollment at Pine Crest had dropped from 1,400 to slightly more than 700 in the past 15 years, so the students have been moved to the Brook Haven campus, creating a K-8 school within the district.
In hopes of consolidating its 270 students onto a common campus, SICS had been in negotiations with SUSD to acquire the property last spring, but could not reach an agreement in time to move for the 2011-12 school year.
SICS is hoping for a long-term lease with an option to purchase, but ran into resistance from the school district, which is not interested in selling the property and is constrained by law to a lease arrangement of no more than three years.
“The property is not for sale,” SUSD Superintendent Liz Schott said in an interview on Friday. “The law is clear that we can’t have a lease beyond three years. SICS didn’t want any part of that. They wanted to buy.”
In March of this year SICS submitted two proposals to SUSD, one for outright purchase of the property for $5.1 million and the other a lease for two 10-year terms, with an option to buy if the district were to decide to sell.
“We kept coming back to the table with various lease option offers and tried to work out a deal that met our requirements for a long term lease and theirs of a short term lease, but by May 2 (we) hadn’t reached a deal,” SICS Director Susan Olson wrote in an e-mail. “Sebastopol Charter walked away in the end, saying we just could not afford the price SUSD wanted for a lease with no option to buy at the end.”
But now, SICS wants to return to the table and even proposed helping SUSD pay for staff time and legal counsel at last week’s board meeting.
Schott appreciates the offer, but believes it would lead to conflicts of interest in a situation that is already difficult.
“The board was trying very hard to be accommodating. We wanted SICS in there,” she said. “They had been fundraising for years to purchase a permanent home and said that a lease was not an investment.”
SICS houses most if its students at the building it owns on South Main Street, but has outgrown the space and is expecting to have even more students in the future, while the SUSD has continued to contract.
In September, the district moved its 63-student REACH charter program to the Pine Crest campus and last month THUSD inquired about the property.
Representatives from SICS attending the meeting said they were surprised by the closed session items on both the THUSD and SUSD agendas, but Schott said she informed the school about the issue.
“I shared (the Twin Hills offer) with Susan several weeks ago. I don’t want any surprises,” Schott said. “SunRidge is running out of room for its 7th and 8th grade students, but there has been no formal offer. Anybody can make a bid until April, when we start the process over again.”
She added that any offer would be agendized in future public meetings and hasn’t precluded anyone from further negotiations.
“Our board is not for or against anyone occupying that space with some provisions,” she said.
Schott added that there are likely as many students from SunRidge that live in the district as there are SICS students in the district and sees any potential deal as benefiting the community.
“We were really hoping to come to an agreement with SICS. There wasn’t another offer at the time, but we were advised not to sell,” Schott said. “It was a business decision.”
As to keeping the property, Schott thinks it is in the district’s best interests to hold on to it in case of future needs.