Songy: Tax extension needed to modernize older campuses

• By DAVID J. MITCHELL
• Advocate River parishes bureau
• Published: Sep 10, 2009 - Page: 1B

• Print
• Email
• Save
• Reprints
• Twitter
• Share

• Del.icio.us
• Digg
• Facebook
• Reddit
• 

GONZALES — Ascension Parish School Superintendent Donald Songy said Wednesday the school system will soon have nine schools built in the 21st century but eight that are 50 or more years old.

Raised in a lightly attended public meeting at the East Ascension High School auditorium, the superintendent’s point underscored the disparity school officials have said they are trying to address with a proposed $100 million bond issue on the Oct. 17 election ballot.

Songy told the meeting audience that the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools noted the differences between the old and new schools during an accreditation review a few years ago and recommended the differences be addressed.

“There is  a very big disparity between your old facilities and your new ones,” Songy said SACS told school officials.

The new tax package would be paid for with a four-year extension of an existing 15.08- mill property tax that now pays for past capital debts and has been extended four times previously since January 1993, school officials have said and Advocate reports have detailed.

The 15.08 mills currently cost the owner of a $200,000 house with homestead exemption $188.50 annually. The proposed extension would not raise that cost.

The sum total of all the extensions of the property tax since January 1993, including the one now on the ballot, will have moved out the end date for bond debt payments from 2000 to 2033. Payments for a $70 million bond issue in 2005 are now scheduled to end in 2029, Songy said.

But the extensions have generated a combined $144 million for construction and improvements over the years as the system has tried to address double-digit growth in that period, school officials said previously.

Songy said this new $100 million bond issue is aimed primarily at improving 20 existing schools in the system.

Some of the oldest schools were built as a part of Works Progress Administration projects in the 1930s during the Great Depression.

Those schools are not geared to handle the technology in the classrooms of today, with Songy noting that some old classroom have just two electrical plugs.

In the East Ascension High feeder system, about $37 million of the $100 million would be spent on primary and secondary schools, Songy said.

Among the largest expenses in that area would be the costs of building a new George Washington Carver Primary School at $16 million and paying for major improvements, demolition and classroom additions to Gonzales Primary School at $9.2 million. Historic buildings would be saved.