The Gainesville charter school governance council met Tuesday to get parent and principal input on student achievement and how best to improve school roofs.

Principals and parent representatives from each of the system’s seven schools expressed their views on the school system’s leaky roof problems and how the system might best use about $400,000 of funds leftover from construction of the new Gainesville Middle School.

Four out of eight of the Gainesville system’s facilities need total roof replacements. Enota Multiple Intelligences Academy, Centennial Arts Academy, Fair Street IB World School and Wood’s Mill Academy, the old middle school that houses various programs, need new roofs. The old gym at Gainesville High School also needs to be replaced.

Keith Vincent, manager of maintenance and operations for Gainesville schools, estimates the new roofs will cost about $3.1 million.
Gainesville schools Superintendent Merrianne Dyer led the discussion Tuesday.

Dyer estimates the school system has about $350,000 to $450,000 leftover from SPLOST funds, or special 1-cent sales taxes, not used to build the new Gainesville Middle School. She said the system is settling its final costs with the architecture firm and will soon have a more definitive figure.

The $33 million school came in under budget, and the remaining funds can be applied to plugging the leaky roofs until voters have the option to approve the next SPLOST in 2011, Dyer said. If voters approve the funds, they would be available to the school system in 2012.

“My recommendation is to use this money wisely on our roofs because if we don’t, everything below it, we can just forget about,” Vincent said of the leftover middle school SPLOST funds. “We can take this money and do the worst sections on each roof until the (next) SPLOST money comes in.”

Vincent told the council that many of the leaks are in clusters, and he recommends a complete roof replacement on targeted sections of the leaky roofs. The highest priority is at Fair Street IB World School, he said. Patching the worst school roofs at Fair Street and Enota is no longer an option, he added.

“If you spend $30,000 of taxpayers’ money to patch a roof and then in two years take it off, you haven’t done anything,” Vincent said.

He said it would cost about $150,000 to completely replace parts of the roof at Fair Street. He said it would cost about $35,000 to redo the seams on the roof at Enota, $35,000 to redo the seams on the roof at Wood’s Mill Academy and $130,000 to replace the roof at the old high school gym that is needed to accommodate physical education classes.

Vincent said he believes the recent repairs to Centennial will hold the school’s roof until 2012.

Jeannine Callahan, mother of students at Centennial, Gainesville Middle and Gainesville High, said the plan to replace roof sections and repair seams may be the temporary solution.

“It sounds like that’s our best option. It sounds like our only option at this point until we can get more funds,” she said.