Iowa City schools consider expediting designs for Hoover land after parent questions

The Iowa City Community School District could spend between $374,000 and $484,000 this year on designs for the site of Hoover Elementary School - expediting that process and possibly delaying other facilities updates - to answer parents' questions about the district's plans for the school, officials said this week.

School board president Chris Lynch said Wednesday the board is leaning against that move, but it will collect more community input over the next two weeks and discuss the issue again at a July 28 board meeting. The board voted Tuesday night to table the issue.

Hoover Elementary, adjacent to City High School at 2200 East Ct., Iowa City, is scheduled to be closed no earlier than the 2017-18 school year and eventually demolished under the 10-year facilities master plan approved in 2013.

District officials have said closing the school will free up land for the expansion of City High, where construction on a second phase of renovations and additions is scheduled to start in 2019. But parents at a public meeting last month expressed frustration about what they felt was a lack of clarity from the district.

Entering the design phase of that project now would be unusual. The construction, like many other projects in the facilities plan, is slated to be funded by a bond issue that hinges on a September 2017 referendum.

None of the other facilities projects that would be funded by the bond will be fully designed until after the bond vote, Lynch and Superintendent Stephen Murley said. The district plans to cover design costs for those projects, including the City High expansion, using funds from the bond issue.

Designing the project this year also would cost between $374,498 and $484,294, according to administrators' estimates. That money likely would come out of the district's Physical Plant and Equipment Levy fund, Lynch and Murley said, which this year has a budget of $700,000.

The PPEL fund usually is used to update playgrounds, athletic fields, tennis courts and other facilities, Lynch said.

Providing more information to Hoover parents concerned about the school's closure shouldn't cost that much, said Chris Liebig, who has a child at the school. Liebig also is the treasurer of Save Hoover, a political committee set up by parents to advocate for keeping the school open.

'I don't think what people want requires $400,000,” Liebig said. 'I think they just want an explanation of what the needs are that would require taking that much property.”

Murley said the district can't know how much Hoover property it will use or what exactly the property will be used for without getting engineers involved. Administrators are uncomfortable making rough plans, he said, because community members might assume they represent exactly what will happen.

'We don't want to get into it later and have the engineers tell us, ‘Well, you can't put that there,'” Murley said.

Adding the Hoover property to City High's 35-acre campus also would bring it closer in size to the campuses of West High School (86 acres) and the planned Liberty High School (78 acres), Murley said.