“Part of the reason we’ve been holding on to that building...(is) just because we didn’t know the growth of the community,” Bellbrook Superintendent Doug Cozad said. “Information we were getting five, six, seven years ago (was) that there was going to be a lot of growth in the students enrolling in the schools, and we just haven’t seen that growth.”
The campus includes the three-story school building built in 1925, a one-story school building built in 1956, an old bus barn and a garage. The 8.41-acre site is also located within a floodplain.
Both school buildings need roof repairs of about $364,000, new boilers at $120,000 and HVAC replacements and upgrades, the cost of which are undetermined as yet, district documents show. The parking lot is also in need of $50,000 worth of patching.
The board has had several public meetings on the topic since last October, and community feedback about the site so far has been “pretty consistent,” board member Audra Dorn said.
“The biggest angst we’ve heard from folks, this concern, is ‘please don’t let this fall into the hands of a developer,‘” she said.
While the board generally agrees with that sentiment, it doesn’t make sense for the board to continue owning the property and investing money in it unless it is going towards students' education, Dorn added.
“If we decide to divest — and we’re going to have to start making those decisions here relatively soon ... then I think we need, we want, to be able to turn it over to the hands of a trusted community partner,” she said.
A few new uses have already been proposed by the community. The Bellbrook Lions Club proposed a solution at a school board meeting at the end of January, envisioning a “community clubhouse” or a senior center on the property. The club also proposed tearing down the old 1925 structure to build residential housing.
The Lions Club hosts its annual Summerfest next to the old Sugarcreek Elementary.
“We want to create an infrastructure for community-focused functions,” Lions Club past president Jim Yankel told the school board. “A location that can be utilized by local organizations, events, and leverage the proximity to downtown.”
The district ultimately has a few options on what to do with the property, by law: sell the property at a public auction, sell it to a government entity, college, or charter school, sell the property in an ordinary private sale if at least one public auction has failed to secure a buyer, trade the property for other necessary real estate, or donate the property to an eligible non-profit, as long as the value is less than $2,500.
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