The Northeast School Corp. Board of Trustees agreed to let sleeping dogs lie, or property in this case — which is good news for a prospective charter group.
During their monthly meeting Monday, three of the trustees — board vice president Marci Childs and member Ron Frye were absent — unanimously agreed to deem the corporation’s property inside Dugger Elementary and Union Junior/Senior High schools worthless to them.
This doesn’t mean the items — which include chairs, desks and chalkboards — don’t have value. Instead, it would cost the corporation as much or more to sell the items at auction than they would fetch.
“The things that are left over, being (purchased by) public money, you have to have an auction ...,” said NESC Superintendent Mark Baker. “So I contacted Johnny Swalls to come down and to go through the building. He went room by room, took a look at what was in the building, put a value on each one of the (items) that were in the rooms.
“I’ve given you his recommendation, and the amount of man hours it would take to put all of that stuff ... someplace where you can have an auction, it cost about as much in manpower to move everything as it would to leave it where it is,” he continued, adding an Indiana code allows schools to leave such property with a building.
With the designation, the property would remain in the building — which NESC closed after last school year — for use by any charter school group that would lease the facility once it is placed on a registry with the Indiana Department of Education.
That would likely include the Indiana Cyber Charter School this year in advance of Dugger Union Community School Corp.’s plans once they obtain an authorizer.
“We definitely appreciate getting whatever else is there,” said DUCSC Board President Kyle Foli. “We are already ready to go — we’ve had multiple donations from other schools.”
When DUCSC formed in early December, they had plans of opening this August once they could find an entity to sponsor their charter. NESC agreed in February to have the building submitted to IDOE’s registry no later than July 31.
However, DUCSC’s prospective authorizer, the Indiana Charter School Board, declined to do so, leading the group to partner now with ICCS, which will operate a satellite location there in August.
Foli also said they are continuing to perfect their charter’s proposal in advance of seeking another sponsor to open in August 2015.
“It’s still in progress,” he said of their charter. “We’re still moving forward with that.”
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