CHARLESTON, W.Va. — It will once again be a very competitive process to see which county school systems get some of the $51.4 million available from the state School Building Authority in Needs Grant funding.
The SBA has received information on proposed projects from 30 counties totaling $248 million. The deadline to submit projects was last Friday.
SBA Director of Architectural Services Ben Ashley said nine of those counties are seeking funding for new schools which is nearly triple those type of requests when compared to recent years. Ashley said that tells a story about the kind of shape some school buildings are in.
“There’s a lot of facilities out there that are just old and in need of replacement,” Ashley told MetroNews Monday. “Many of them have gotten to the point where it’s just not worth sinking a whole bunch of money into fixing them up.”
Summers County is one of the county’s seeking funding. Superintendent David Warvel said his county needs money for a middle school addition to the existing Summers County High School.
“We’d like to get 15 classrooms, a gymnasium and a cafeteria,” Warvel said.
Early estimates for the project were around $9 million. Summers County moved their middle school students into the high school building at the start of school last fall because of deteriorating conditions in the former middle school building. The state Board of Education has approved a plan for a comprehensive school in the existing high school building beginning with the 2021-2022 school year.
Ashley said the projects submitted from the 30 counties are all needed projects but unfortunately there will be several not chosen for funding.
“Fortunately for the taxpayers it makes sure that we are funding really good projects from counties that are working at becoming efficient both operationally and facility-wise,” Ashley said.
The SBA staff will now begin its comprehensive reviews of all of the projects submitted including on-site visits, Ashley said.
“We’ll verify the need in every county and we’ll work to make sure what they’ve written down can be expressly explained to members of the School Building Authority who will choose the projects to be funded based on recommendations and verifications,” Ashley said. “We sift through the details to find the really, really good projects. We’re excited about that. We know we have a major challenge in front of us.”
School superintendents from the 30 counties will appear before the SBA to pitch their projects on March 15-16. The SBA is scheduled to meet April 19 to make its funding decisions.