With early voting already underway, Hart County voters will notice that the ESPLOST is once again up for renewal.
ESPLOST, or Education Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax, is a one-percent sales tax that raises additional funds for school systems to use on projects and upgrades outside of their normal operating budgets. Each time voters elect to allow the one-cent tax, the collection is established for five years, or until the collected revenues meet the established cap, which was the case for the current ESPLOST.
“We’ve collected the funds quicker than we anticipated, and that’s why we’re going to the voters earlier than anticipated,” Hart County Superintendent Jennifer Carter said. “The cap on this one is $18 million, and we’re collecting that a little bit sooner so that’s why we’re going to the voters earlier than anticipated.”
If passed, this sixth edition of ESPLOST in Hart County would allow for collections of up to $30,580,000 over the next five years.
ESPLOST funds have been used by Hart County Charter System in the past for projects such as the Hart College and Career Academy, the Hart County High School gym, known as the “Health and Wellness Center,” and an Agri-Science Center. The current ESPLOST funds were used for projects such as the Instructional Technology Building, greenhouses at Hart County Middle and High School and numerous renovations across the district. A multi-sport athletic building is currently being put out for bid as one of the final projects to use ESPLOST funds from the current collection.
As for the proposed projects for the next ESPLOST, if voters vote “Yes” at the polls, Carter said the system plans to use the funds for various projects, including a new field house located beside the HCHS football field, renovations to North Hart Elementary and South Hart Elementary, and a new “professional learning building” which will contain the superintendent and other administration offices for the system.
If collected in full, the $30,580,000 would allot $16,230,000 for new construction, $9,350,000 for facility upgrades/renovations, $1,500,000 for safety and security upgrades, $2,300,000 for technology upgrades and digital resources, and $1,200,000 for transportation/fleet upgrades.
PROJECT PRIORITIES
However Carter said it starts with an expanded parking lot.
“You work to address your most immediate needs first, and so our most immediate needs are on the high school campus,” she said. “That population has grown more than any of our other schools and so we have children that are turning 16 this year and are super excited about being able to drive to school. They’re going to the office and asking for their parking passes, and they’re having to say ‘Sorry, we don’t have any left.’ That doesn’t sit well if you’re the 16 year old or the parent of the 16 year old….So that would be our place that we would start first.”
Carter said the plan would be to expand the high school campus where the current transportation and maintenance facilities are, beside the high school. These facilities would move to a newly acquired lot off Bowman Highway, which the school system purchased from GF Parker Inc. for $509,355 on Sept. 28, according to public record.
“To create more space on that high school campus, we would be looking to move our transportation facility and our maintenance facility onto a property that we’ve already purchased on Bowman Highway,” Carter said. “Then with those facilities gone, we could expand the campus and have additional parking there.”
Carter also said that with the extra room for expansion at HCHS, it could allow for the building of a new JROTC Rifle Range and Archery facility, which would use funds from the previous ESPLOST.
HCHS could also see upgrades at Bobby Pate Field House with the new ESPLOST.
“One of the bigger projects is that we would hope to construct a new field house,” Carter said. “The current one is down below the high school near the football stadium. If you’ve driven that way at all, you can see it’s a very narrow entryway. A bus can get in, but in order to get out, they have to back straight out. That creates a dangerous situation, so they often stop on the road and let the kids off the bus. That’s dangerous, especially in the dark of night. Then inside, it just is not an adequate space to meet our needs…so we would look at a new field house, of course keeping the name the same.”
Carter said that keeping the field house named after former coach Bobby Pate is a must.
“That’s important to us here. He was a long time coach here within our school system, so we would maintain the name, but definitely do a new building, assuming this ESPLOST goes through.”
DAYCARE DILEMA
Carter said the system would also look to establish an on-site daycare facility in the current Board of Education building in hopes of providing childcare for school employees and others in the community.
“We’re losing employees because we don’t have adequate childcare within the county,” Carter said. “There just aren’t a lot of daycares. We have more in-home daycares than we have actual facilities, but those spots are just very limited and so we have lost employees because they don’t have adequate childcare. This could be renovated to help meet that need.”
Carter said the daycare spots would be offered to school system employees first, then to the community to fill the spots. Carter added that the employees would still have to pay for the service.
She said the daycare facility would also allow students studying education in the career academy to gain hands-on experience, much like the students in other pathways already do.
Building the daycare in the Board of Education building would also require the current administration offices in the building to move. Carter said the plan would be to build a new building for “professional learning” that would contain those offices and allow the system staff to all be located under one roof.
“All of our departments that make us function are not under one roof, so putting us under one roof would definitely increase our efficiency and our effectiveness,” she said. “So building that building would put us all under one roof and then it would allow this to be renovated to be a daycare facility.”
Carter said the safety and security upgrades would include updating camera systems in some of the schools, while the technology upgrades would go toward in-classroom technology used for instruction. The $1.2 million in transportation/fleet upgrades would likely go toward new buses.
TOUGH DECISIONS
With $30.58 million of plans pending the vote, if the community votes “No” to the next ESPLOST later this month, Carter said it will make for some tough decisions on which projects can still happen.
“You’re forced to make decisions at that point,” she said, “and you really want to make decisions that don’t negatively impact the instruction you provide to students. If they don’t have the latest and greatest in instructional technology, is that negatively going to impact the instruction that they receive in the classroom? It most definitely could. So then you would have to look to fund it another way. And if you couldn’t fund it another way or if you decided not to fund it another way, then you know that you’re not providing them the absolute best that’s out there, and that’s what you don’t want to have happen.”
Those other ways of funding could potentially come from grants or tax revenue.
“Ultimately, it could mean that you have to increase your milage rate in order to collect the dollars that you need to provide for students to have a quality education,” Carter said. “I hate to say that because I don’t want anybody to ever feel like I’m threatening that. It’s not supposed to be a threat at all, but at the same time, I’m charged with providing the best instruction to students that we possibly can.”