BROKEN BOW – On Tuesday, April 18, the Broken Bow School District took its first step on the road to renovation at a public forum moderated by Custer County Board of Supervisors Chairman Barry Fox.
At 6 p.m., roughly 25 residents, including school board members and Broken Bow administration, alongside architects, construction executives, and financial planners, took seats at Kinkaider to try and loosen what’s been a thorn in the district’s side for the better part of 40 years.
Since its initial construction in 1938, Broken Bow’s Middle and High School facilities have seen only 7 major updates, the last one coming in 1984 in the form of a media center.
Certain facilities have been more recently updated; however, all three renovations have been to benefit Broken Bow’s athletics: the announcer’s booth in 1997, the concessions stand in 2000, and the wrestling room in 2017, the last of which was made possible through booster club funding.
With the recent bond initiative failing to pass, the community and school district now faces quite the headache: facilities that aren’t getting any younger, and no way to pay for the facelift.
The needs, both proposed and actual, are many: a new performing arts space, an expansion of CTE classrooms, and updating science labs that would have been state-of-the-art when Apollo 11 was a wish upon a star, not to mention an asthmatic HVAC system that still doesn’t provide air conditioning to some areas. The district is also looking to improve its safety infrastructure and create adequate and updated gym spaces for physical education and athletics.
While the needs for the school increase, so do the prices. The proposed renovation plan from just 2 years ago tallied just under $30 million, an updated plan for 2023, which claims smaller square footage than its ancestor, comes in at $36.5 million.
Broken Bow School Board Treasurer J.B. Atkins outlined the ever-steepening hill that a bond vote would have to overcome to make such projects a reality.
“A twelve-cent bond failed, a twenty-six-cent bond will almost certainly fail. The conundrum we have as a board is: where can we put your money so that you can get the biggest bang for your buck?”
There aren’t any easy answers. The last bond failed overwhelmingly by a 60/40 vote, with an abysmal 38% voter turnout. The difficulty is that a passed bond would mean higher property taxes, a tough sell, even for supporters of the initiative.
The tax hike is certainly an issue, but it hasn’t been the only hurdle; Broken Bow Superintendent Darren Tobey worried that the previous bond could have failed for a dizzying number of reasons.
“Did it fail last time because nobody wants to pay for it? Was it miscommunication? You talk to five different people, you get five different answers. We’ve heard everything under the sun.”
In spite of the defeat, this time around, the district has put forth 4 possible solutions. The first proposes running the failed bond again and the second a new bond based on the updated 2023 designs. The third and fourth forego the bond entirely, one would accomplish the renovations in 7-year increments through a leasing program, and the last would update spaces as funds become available.
If the school district does opt for the latter two options, a quick number crunch shows that it would take a minimum of about 42 years to complete the 6 projects, which for some, unfortunately, renders the renovations hardly worth the work.
For Custer Economic Development Corporation Executive Director Keith Ellis, however, failing to update the school could prove far more costly than a tax increase.
“When we talk about recruitment of businesses, or bringing site consultants in, or industry prospects, they look at two things: they look at the school system and they look at the hospital. We’re competing against other schools, we’ve got to ask: what do they have that we don’t have?”
While nothing could be officially decided at the forum, those present walked away with two things to figure out: how much they’d be willing to pay, and how to bring those who voted down the initial bond to the table. The school district has scheduled a second forum for Thursday, the 28 at noon.
